By September 2026, women headed close to one in four households in Gaza, roughly 86,290 households, up from one in nine before October 2023, according to a UN Women report titled “Left to Carry Households Alone.” (https://www.unwomen.org/en/news-stories/press-briefing/2026/09/women-now-head-one-in-four-households-double-the-pre-october-2023-rate) The count is wider than a widow tally alone: it folds in women whose husbands are missing, detained, severely injured or forcibly disappeared, as well as those confirmed dead.
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, working from a narrower definition limited to confirmed widows, counted 22,057 women in Gaza who have lost a husband since the war began, enough to lift the female-headed-household share from 12 percent before the war to about 18 percent during it, Middle East Monitor reported. The smaller rise reflects the narrower count, not a smaller war: PCBS tracks confirmed deaths, UN Women adds everyone whose husband is simply gone.
Writing for Al Jazeera, Maram Humaid traces one household behind those totals through the account of Nisreen Touman, 34, originally of Nuseirat and now living at her family’s home in Gaza City. Touman has been widowed twice since the war began, and lost two young sons in the same strike that killed her first husband.
Touman’s first husband, Sami, 35, was shot in the head by an Israeli quadcopter outside their home on June 8, 2024, as he went to gather their sons, Mahmoud, 5, and Laith, 2. Minutes later an airstrike hit the house where 25 members of the extended family were sheltering. Both boys died. So did Touman’s sister Sabreen, 36, her mother-in-law, two brothers-in-law and their children — 18 relatives of her husband’s in total. The strike was part of the operation that freed four Israeli hostages from Nuseirat that day, Noa Argamani, Shlomi Ziv, Almog Meir Jan and Andrey Kozlov, all recovered unharmed. Gaza’s Health Ministry put the toll at 274 Palestinians killed and 698 wounded across the camp; the UN said the Israeli military hit 89 residential buildings in roughly four hours and its human rights experts called the conduct “outrageous disregard” for civilian life, in a statement condemning the raid. The Israeli military’s own count, by contrast, was fewer than 100 deaths, one of the wider gaps between Israeli and Palestinian casualty figures to come out of the war.
Four and a half months later, Mohammed — Sami’s brother, and Sabreen’s widower — proposed. He had four children who needed raising; Touman, by her own account, resisted remarrying but agreed, mainly so she could help care for her sister’s youngest, then one year old. She describes the match as practical rather than romantic: two people who had each lost a spouse, filling the gap together.
Mohammed had breakfast with the children on July 8, 2025 and left to see a friend. A neighbor told Touman shortly after that he had been killed in a strike near al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat. She was pregnant at the time.
Touman gave birth to a daughter, Sidra, about four months later. Sidra turns one this month. Touman now lives with her at her family’s home; Sabreen’s four children are raised by their grandfather, and she visits. She describes becoming withdrawn, keeping to quiet time with her daughter, and putting off any decision about remarrying again.
| From | To | How |
|---|---|---|
| War begins (October 2023) | Husband Sami killed (June 8, 2024, Nuseirat raid) | |
| Husband Sami killed (June 8, 2024, Nuseirat raid) | Sons Mahmoud, 5, and Laith, 2, killed (same strike, minutes later) | same strike |
| Sons Mahmoud, 5, and Laith, 2, killed (same strike, minutes later) | Remarries Mohammed (~November 2024, her brother-in-law) | |
| Remarries Mohammed (~November 2024, her brother-in-law) | Mohammed killed (July 8, 2025, near al-Awda Hospital) | |
| Mohammed killed (July 8, 2025, near al-Awda Hospital) | Ceasefire takes effect (October 11, 2025) | |
| Ceasefire takes effect (October 11, 2025) | Daughter Sidra born (~November 2025) |
UN Women’s own count of households like Touman’s has moved fast. When the agency’s humanitarian-action chief, Sofia Calltorp, visited Gaza from Jabalia to al-Mawasi last November, she put the number of women-headed households at more than 57,000, some displaced as many as 35 times since October 2023. Ten months later the agency’s survey put the figure at 86,290, a rise of about 51 percent in under a year.
The ceasefire that took effect on October 11, 2025 did not stop the killing that produces households like Touman’s. Between then and July 28, 2026, Israeli air and ground operations killed 246 Palestinian women and girls, 137 women and 109 girls, UN Women counted, a rate of six a week. Gaza’s Health Ministry put the war’s overall toll at 74,237 dead and 175,206 wounded as of October 4, 2026, according to WAFA. The Israel Defense Forces, which spent more than two years disputing the ministry’s numbers, now accepts them as accurate, Haaretz reported.
UN Women’s survey found women-headed households worse off than male-headed ones on every measure it tracked: 68 percent say their shelter needs go unmet, against 55 percent for male-headed households; 74 percent report their homes damaged or destroyed, against 67 percent; they have been displaced an average of eight times since October 2023, against seven; and two-thirds say they need cash immediately to survive. Much of that displacement lands people in buildings too damaged to be called shelter rather than tents.
Sidra turns one this month without having met her father. She is one entry in a count that UN Women has revised upward twice in ten months, and that the Health Ministry’s own tally says is still rising past the ceasefire’s first anniversary, not holding still.