Prior to the war, girls in Gaza outnumbered and outperformed boys at every level of education above primary school. Now, with prolonged school closures, many children have dropped out of education. For boys there is pressure to find informal work to help support their families, for girls there are heightened issues around safety.
Living among strangers, without privacy, in a socially conservative society, there are complaints of heightened sexual harassment and abuse – many families see marrying their daughters as a way to protect them and preserve modesty. The UNFPA report – based on research carried out in late 2025 and early 2026 – reveals how girls orphaned during the war are especially vulnerable.
One woman in a Gaza City camp interviewed for the report says she attended the wedding of two girls from her family, aged just 14 and 15.
“Their uncles married them off very young. Do you know why? Because their father and mother were martyred, and their uncles wanted to get rid of the responsibility and expenses,” the woman said. “By God, they don’t understand what marriage or life is.”
The Women’s Affairs Center in Gaza – a Palestinian NGO which works with the UNFPA – and other support groups have documented distressing cases of girls who have been married and suffered abuse, often becoming pregnant. They say that those in their early teens are much more likely to have miscarriages and underweight babies than adult women.
“We see adolescent pregnancies going through the roof because of child marriage,” says Owomuhangi. “A child who is at an age when the body is not fully developed to sustain another body, who is hungry, in unhygienic circumstances, who doesn’t know how to take care of the infant, who doesn’t even know how to take care of herself, the consequences of that pregnancy are always really, really bad.”
The UN and most humanitarian organisations categorise marriages of girls under 18 as early marriage. Even before the war, this was more common among Palestinians in Hamas-run Gaza than it was in the occupied West Bank, but it was declining.
The law in Gaza allows exceptions to the minimum marital age of 17 with parental consent and authorisation by a judge. Court officials can approve marriage for those as young as 14 years and seven months old, although a local Sharia expert told us that “legal safeguards” had been removed when Islamic courts – which officiate over family matters for Muslims – were closed for a large part of the war.
