GENEVA: An average of at least 47 women and girls were killed each day during the war in Gaza, according to figures published by UN Women on Friday, and the agency warned that deaths have continued six months into a fragile ceasefire.
More than 38,000 women and girls were killed in Gaza between October 2023 and December 2025, according to the report by UN Women, an agency that focuses on gender equality.
“Women and girls accounted for a proportion of deaths far higher than those observed in previous conflicts in Gaza,” Sofia Calltorp, the agency’s humanitarian action head, said in Geneva.
“They were individuals with lives and with dreams,” she added.
The agency expressed concern that the killing of women and girls has continued since an October ceasefire, though it does not know exactly how many have died due to a lack of gender-aggregated data.
October’s ceasefire halted two years of full-scale war but left Israeli troops in control of a depopulated zone that makes up well over half of Gaza, with Hamas in power in the remaining, narrow, coastal strip.
More than 750 Palestinians have been killed since then, according to local medics, while militants have killed four Israeli soldiers. Israel and Hamas have traded blame for ceasefire violations.
Israel says it aims to thwart attacks by Hamas and other militant factions.
UN children’s agency UNICEF said on Friday that children continued to be killed and injured at an alarming rate in Gaza, with at least 214 reported dead in the last six months.
Around one million women and girls are displaced in Gaza, UN Women said.
“Extensive damage to infrastructure has made it almost impossible for women and girls in Gaza to access their basic needs like healthcare,” said Calltorp.
World Health Organization figures show more than 500,000 women lack access to essential services, including antenatal and postnatal care and management of sexually transmitted infections.
Gaza’s civil defense agency said on Thursday that Israeli fire killed four people, including one child, in different locations across the Palestinian territory.
Saleh Badawi, 9, “was killed and taken to Al-Maamadani Hospital after being hit by Israeli fire in the Zeitoun neighborhood, southeast of Gaza City,” in northern Gaza, said Mahmoud Bassal, spokesman for the civil defense agency.
He added that “two brothers” were killed earlier in the day, following an Israeli drone strike near a school in Beit Lahia, also in the north, and another man, 38-year-old Mohsen Ouda Al-Dabbari, was killed by Israeli fire near Khan Younis, in the south.
The Israeli army claimed that it killed “two terrorists” in Beit Lahia after they crossed the Yellow Line, which marks the boundary of the area under Israeli control, and approached its soldiers in a manner that constituted an immediate threat.
The army said that it was verifying reports concerning the child and the man killed in the south.
