Drawing on their own lived experiences, speakers from Palestine, Sudan, Ukraine and Syria highlighted the devastating realities of women’s lives under occupation in an event co-hosted by the Ceasefire Centre for Civilian Rights and the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy. The panel described the direct violations endured by women, including arbitrary detention and conflict-related sexual violence, as well as the profound indirect harms caused by occupation, such as the denial of access to essential services.
The event on 30 June 2026 was chaired by Emily Prey (New Lines), with opening remarks by Mae Thompson (Ceasefire). The panel featured a keynote from human rights lawyer and women’s rights activist Margaret Owen OBE, followed by interventions from Amira Nimerawi (Health Workers 4 Palestine), Dr. Eva Khair (Women4Sudan), Alisa Kovalenko (SEMA Ukraine) and Simav Hasan (Syrians for Truth and Justice).
While the experience of conflict varies across countries and regions, common patterns of harm, as well as survival, emerged. The speakers were united in calling for greater international attention to these harms, to women’s needs and in calling for justice and peace, alongside meaningful action to uphold their rights and ensure accountability for human rights violations and international crimes.
Margaret Owen OBE on the disproportionate impact of military occupation on women and girls
Owen called the current moment a global crisis, one she said falls hardest on women, driven by the breakdown of the rules-based order and rising impunity. Occupying states, she noted, rarely describe themselves that way. She named contexts she considers current examples, including Israel’s actions in Gaza, which she described as genocide; Türkiye’s actions against Kurds in Syria; and Rwanda in eastern Congo.
Women under occupation, she said, often face both oppression from the occupying power and the patriarchal customs of the occupied state. She drew attention to the fact that in some countries women are made stateless entirely and, more broadly, women living under occupation frequently lose their citizenship, furthering their vulnerability and limiting their access to protection. But women are not only victims. They are ‘key nurturers and custodians of the social fabric of society’, the ones who ‘keep everything going’.
She criticized continued UK support for some of the states she named and called for a UN Special Rapporteur on women under occupation, for local women to be at the centre of policymaking, and new peace structures with stronger women’s leadership.
Amira Nimerawi on women’s healthcare and reproductive rights in Palestine
Nimerawi described what she called ‘medical apartheid’ in Gaza and the West Bank, ‘built specifically to deny women access to care’. Targeting women’s bodies, she argued, is a way of targeting future generations, ‘part of the genocidal project that Israel is carrying out against the Palestinians’. She pointed to breast cancer, which she called ‘one of the leading causes of preventable medical conditions across Palestine’, not because the disease is more aggressive in Palestinian women, but because restricted access, including a ban on MRI machines entering Gaza, and a 500 checkpoint increase across the West Bank, have denied them basic screening and treatment. She spoke of her own cousin, three years of a slow, painful death after a diagnosis that came too late, because she had no access to screening or treatment, who left behind small children.
Citing UN findings, Nimerawi said women in Gaza are three times more likely to die in childbirth or miscarry, with roughly 5,500 women a month giving birth without pain relief. In the West Bank, she said, movement restrictions have forced women to deliver at checkpoints, often with Israeli soldiers standing by, an indignity she said she ‘can’t even begin to imagine’. She spoke of a woman she met in Cairo, Leena, who survived a bomb blast that hit her home in early 2024, an explosion so severe it left her needing a prosthetic eye and reconstructive surgery to her hands. Her one-week-old son, sleeping between her and her husband, was killed in the blast. Despite everything, Leena would still find moments to smile, and a year later, after helping her husband reach treatment as well, she gave birth safely in Cairo to a healthy baby girl.
Nimerawi said she has come to reject the word ‘resilience’, which she feels places the burden of endurance on women instead of asking why they must endure it. ‘We refuse to be victims’, she said.
Dr. Eva Khair on the humanitarian and protection crisis facing women in Sudan
Khair opened with a question she says she hears often: why doesn’t Sudan get more attention? Her answer pushed back on the premise itself: ‘Palestine has all the attention in the world, and it’s still not doing enough for the people of Palestine. It isn’t just about attention. It’s about political will’.
She traced the war in Sudan to the fall of Omar al-Bashir’s three-decade rule and the escalating power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF): ‘These are two elements of the state fighting each other and absolutely crushing the civilians.’ ‘Everyone in Sudan is under occupation’, she said, criticising US and UK alliances in the region that, she argued, are undermining peace and security.
She described that for women across Sudan, even getting milk or soap can mean encountering a soldier ‘who wants to extract or coerce sexual favours’. With the UN and international humanitarian system largely locked out, she said, civil society and mutual aid groups have carried the burden. Women’s organizations, however, are being deliberately shut out: in SAF territory, they are blocked from registering, and without registration, they cannot access funding. In RSF territory, she described a near-total telecommunications blackout, women in West Kordofan banned from accessing Starlink, cutting them off from advocacy, humanitarian data and mobile banking, ‘a real silencing’, she argued, which then hands men disproportionate power and control over women’s lives.
She read a short testimony from Amal, an aid worker in Al Obeid, North Kordofan, a city under an 18-month siege that she called ‘an occupation within an occupation’. ‘People in Al Obeid are extremely afraid of the escalating situation’, the testimony read, describing a strike on a shelter that killed two women and three children. The drone strikes have targeted homes, schools, electricity stations and water facilities, leaving most hospitals non-functional.
Of Sudan’s 48 million people, 14 million are displaced, in what Khair called the world’s largest hunger crisis, with around 60,000 killed in the Darfur massacre. ‘People are dying everyday’, she said. ‘It’s not over’.
Alisa Kovalenko on conflict-related sexual violence in Ukraine
Kovalenko, a filmmaker and survivor of detention by Russian forces, shared her own story: captured at 26, she was told by the officer who had raped her that she ‘should be grateful’ she hadn’t been executed.
In 2019, she and other survivors founded SEMA Ukraine, the country’s first survivor-led organization for women survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. As Ukrainian forces liberated occupied territories, she said, SEMA Ukraine ‘suddenly found ourselves supporting thousands of affected women’, and the organization tripled in size. Its members range in age from 17 to 75, ‘a stark reminder that Russia’s violence spares no generation’, she said. Russia, she said, ‘uses sexual violence as a weapon to terrorize, humiliate and suppress resistance’. Stigma, Kovalenko said, keeps many survivors silent.
A teaser of her documentary Traces, winner of the Panorama Audience Award at Berlinale 2026, was screened during the session. Co-directed by Marysia Nikitiuk and made with support from the Mukwege Foundation, the film follows the journey of Iryna Dovgan, a former captive turned activist, as she brings fellow survivors together to speak, listen and support one another. She said the women in the trailer ‘are not only the protagonists of my documentary film, they are my sisters in SEMA Ukraine, my fellow survivors and some of the bravest women I know’. Among them, she said, was a 75-year-old woman whose home was entered by a Russian soldier who beat her with his rifle, knocking out her front teeth, and then raped her.
‘My sisters and I ask ourselves a simple question: how can we make our voices louder, how can we preserve the memory of these crimes, and how can we fight for justice’, she said. As a filmmaker, she believed documentary cinema could become one of these tools ‘and that was the beginning of Traces’. She recalled travelling to a newly liberated area with the head of SEMA Ukraine. ‘Everywhere we looked, we saw traces’, she said, visible traces like destroyed villages, forests, minefields and bunkers, but also invisible traces ‘left inside people, inside memory, inside human lives’. One of the women they met there was Olha, also seen in the trailer: Russian soldiers took her, her husband and her 19-year-old son into captivity, tortured her son in the neighbouring cell so she could hear his screams, then tortured Olha herself with electric shocks, raped her and killed her family. They repeatedly told her, ‘people like them should not exist’. She spent nine months in captivity.
‘The only way to protect [civilians still living under occupation] is to end the occupation itself’, Kovalenko said. Recovery, in her view, depends on community: ‘healing begins when someone can finally say, I understand you’. Her closing call was: survivors are asking ‘not only to be heard, but to stand with us shoulder to shoulder’.
Simav Hasan on the targeting of Kurdish women in Syria
Hasan opened by widening the definition of occupation: it is ‘not only about controlling territory, it is about controlling people’s lives’. Kurdish women, she said, are targeted twice over, ‘because they are women and because of their ethnic identity’.
For more than 14 years, she said, Syrian women have endured violence from multiple perpetrators, the Assad regime, extremist groups, armed opposition and governments controlling different parts of the country. She spoke in particular of violations against Kurdish women in Turkish-occupied north Syria. Since the regime’s fall in December 2024, many Syrians hoped its end would mark the start of protection for civilians. Instead, Hasan said, ‘for many women, violence has continued. The perpetrators may have changed, the methods sometimes change, but the insecurity remains’.
She described the case of two Kurdish sisters detained without charge and tortured in a secret prison as one example of a broader pattern. One of the sisters, Lonjin, was just 17 at the time of her detention and later founded the Lelun Association for victims. Since the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, Syrians for Truth and Justice has documented over 160 reports concerning women across Syria, including in areas or former areas of Turkish occupation, including 85 killings of women and girls and 44 cases of physical assault. She also pointed to a targeted campaign of abductions against Alawite women and girls, documented by her organization across four governates, women taken ‘from markets, from school, from roads’, in broad daylight, for ransom or sectarian revenge. The Stop the Abduction of Syrian Women campaign has verified over 130 such cases between February and December 2025 alone, with 36 women still unaccounted for. She said the transitional government’s response has been denial, with the interior ministry confirming just 1 of 42 reviewed disappearance cases as an abduction, dismissing the rest as voluntary or false.
‘Impunity is becoming institutionalized’, Hasan warned, arguing that occupation should be measured not only by territorial control but by ‘whether women can live safely, whether they can seek justice’. ‘Accountability cannot be selective’, she said.
Key Takeaways
- Occupation shapes healthcare, family life, and daily movement as much as it does territory
- Oftentimes, women and girls are disproportionately affected, and speakers described gendered violence as a deliberate feature of occupation
- Women play a consistent role in holding communities together under occupation
- Grassroots and survivor-led groups were described as lifelines for communities affected by occupation
- Putting an end to illegal occupation, promoting accountability for related crimes and ensuring support for survivors should remain a central priority for the international community.
