Honestly the best piece of advice I can give to younger girls trying to figure life out is to completely ignore men. I’m not being quirky or cute when I say that, I mean it seriously. Ignore men’s judgments of you, ignore their insincere compliments, ignore their half-assed romance. Focus on developing yourself. Practice your art, play sports, do theater, volunteer, spend time with your friends, but do not put substantial effort into pleasing men. They’ll be there for you to pursue when the time comes and if you want to. But nothing will waste your youth more than fighting for male acceptance.
For 153 days, we’ve seen Palestinians taking care of not only fellow humans by sharing food with each other, helping save people from under the rubble, carrying random bloody strangers to hospitals, and lending a helping hand at any given, but we’ve also seen them, constantly, taking care of animals during the genocide.
On this year women's day, all we could think about are Palestinian women in Gaza.
Nearly 9,000 women have been killed in Israeli attacks in five months. Another 2,100 are missing and presumed dead, while 23,000 have been wounded and over half a million are displaced.
“Palestinian women, especially in the Gaza Strip, are exposed to the worst humanitarian catastrophe,” Ashraf al-Qudra, the health ministry’s spokesperson, said on Thursday.
Dozens of women and girls have also been detained and face harsh conditions in Israeli custody, including sexual abuse.
Women in Gaza also struggle to find menstruation products and access the necessary pregnancy and post-natal care. The consequences on reproductive health, including a rise in stress-induced miscarriages, stillbirths and premature births, have increased significantly.
Women in labour are undergoing caesarean procedures without anaesthetics, and a shortage of post-operative care such as medication, antibiotics and pain relief further exacerbates the situation.
According to the health ministry, 5,000 women give birth monthly in Gaza under “harsh, unsafe and unhealthy” conditions caused by Israeli bombing and displacement.
There are 60,000 pregnant women in Gaza suffering from “malnutrition, dehydration and lack of medical care.
There have also been repeated cases of Israeli soldiers mocking Palestinian women by posting videos and pictures of themselves rummaging through personal belongings in Gaza homes, making derogatory comments and posing with women’s underwear.
Repost of Instagram post by alessandra_sanguinetti:
“In 2004 I worked as an intern in Newsweek and had to go through the wires coming in from the Middle East.
The Iraq war was raging. Israel was committing its routine violations and killings.
The images were devastating and unequivocally condemning of both the USA and Israel, but I remember the editors would reject all my picks and demand images of burnt cars or vague images of destruction.
So I brought a hard drive and collected everything they didn't publish.
It was my first live glimpse of the lack of ethics or integrity in most US media.
Not the journalists on the ground, but of the senior editors making the calls - in their self important glass cubicles.
And no, to the cynics out there..it's not all too complicated to discuss on social media.
Social media is the only reason we know what's happening in Palestine.
And the only reason mainstream news has to keep up and sprinkle some actual news now and then.
Meanwhile we are seeing much less footage coming out of Gaza - Israel has been killing off all the journalists.
This is terrifying.”
Photo credits: Nasser Ishtayeh, Yossi Alon, Saif Dahlah, Jaafar Ashtiyeh, Musa Al-Shaer, Abed Onar Qusini