US Aid Cuts Force Gaza Women’s Group to Serve Twice as Many People With Reduced Resources

A women-led organization in Gaza has more than doubled the number of people it assists this year even after losing all U.S. funding in early 2025. The group, which provides legal aid, psychosocial support, a gender-based violence hotline and humanitarian assistance, reached 50,000 people despite operating with a fraction of its former resources after Washington ended a five-year USAID program.

One woman described giving birth in Khan Younis after an ambulance dispatcher said services responded only to injured people. A neighbor used a horse-drawn cart to transport her during labor. Her daughter was born into a conflict that had already killed her son and left her husband too ill to work.

She had endured the pregnancy while malnourished, anemic and lacking vitamins. "Our suffering is immense. My daughter was born amid this tragedy," the woman told The Independent. Months later she located the organization through word of mouth. It provided her with a mattress and access to a psychotherapist.

The war in Gaza began after an attack inside Israel by Hamas on 7 October 2023 that killed around 1,200 people and took 250 hostage. Israel’s response has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians according to health officials in the enclave. The organization was two years into a five-year USAID-supported program worth roughly $1 million a year when funding was cut entirely in early 2025.

The group’s director said everything stopped suddenly and described it as a very difficult period. "If that project had continued, the scale and quality of services would have been very different," the director told The Independent. The organization secured other funders and continued operating but at reduced capacity while absorbing sharply higher demand.

Sharia courts once held exclusive jurisdiction over divorce, custody, inheritance and guardianship. A 2025 report by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights documented the near-total collapse of the system with courts and archives destroyed, thousands of legal case files lost, and judges and staff killed or displaced.

At a UN human rights hearing in March, a representative of Palestinian women’s organizations said dispute resolution had shifted to displacement camps and makeshift mediation sessions even under rubble. A lawyer working with the organization through ActionAid said violence had moved into that vacuum after judicial headquarters were destroyed in airstrikes and courts suspended entirely.

"This war has helped men evade giving women their rights, because of the absence of police and courts," the lawyer said. " The lawyer fields calls from women seeking divorces, unpaid child support for more than a year, or enforcement of pre-war custody arrangements.

There are now believed to be at least 22,000 widows in Gaza and women’s unemployment stands at more than 90 percent. The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights alleges the targeting of Sharia courts forms part of a systematic policy to dismantle Palestinian institutional and legal structures.

Israel has repeatedly denied this and says it does not target civilians or civilian infrastructure.

A psychotherapist with the organization runs sessions from a tent while caring for a two-month-old baby. She described women arriving unable to concentrate because of malnutrition, some fainting during sessions. Many showed clear signs of trauma and carried deep feelings of guilt over the deaths of family members.

"The hardest part of our work is that so often we are both the client and the service provider at the same time," the psychotherapist said. She added that she now lives in a tent that is neither safe nor able to provide security or protection. Women’s rights organisations globally receive less than one percent of humanitarian and gender-focused aid funding according to UN Women.

Local groups like this one were already embedded and operational when international organisations were still establishing logistics. The former USAID money kept lawyers employed and services running for women who had nowhere else to turn. >"Suddenly, everything stopped.

It was a very difficult period. Despite proven effectiveness, they receive minimal shares of international aid. In Gaza the loss of formal institutions has pushed more responsibilities onto such groups even as their own funding shrank. The organization continues operations with alternative donors while demand for its services keeps growing.

>"Our suffering is immense.