DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip – Facing complete destitution after losing her husband and oldest son to Israeli bombing raids, Majda found herself living in a deteriorating tent surrounded by sewage and rodents. Unable to provide for her remaining children and worried about her daughters’ safety in overcrowded displacement camps, she made a heartbreaking decision she continues to regret.
The desperate mother arranged marriages for her 13- and 14-year-old daughters to men who offered protection and financial support.
“I thought I was protecting them,” she said. “Fear was slaughtering me.”
The widespread destruction caused by Israel’s military operations in Gaza has contributed to a sharp rise in marriages involving underage girls, according to specialists and government statistics. With nearly all residents forced from their homes and most surviving in deplorable camp conditions while relying on humanitarian assistance, some families have turned to marrying off their teenage daughters as a way to secure economic stability.
These arrangements have robbed girls of their youth and prospects for the future, often resulting in hazardous pregnancies.
In Majda’s case, her daughters endured terrible physical violence.
Prior to the current conflict, child marriage rates had been gradually decreasing in Gaza, data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics shows. The bureau’s most recent figures from 2022 indicated that 17.8% of marriages included a bride younger than 18, a decline from over 22% recorded in 2015.
Gaza law sets the minimum marriage age at 17, though exceptions are permitted. The United Nations and most relief organizations classify marriages involving girls under 18 as premature unions.
This positive trend has now been reversed.
Following a request from the Associated Press, the Supreme Shariah Court in Gaza, which handles marriage registration, compiled statistics from court staff. Their data reveals that 20.6% of the 35,474 marriages documented in 2024 and 2025 involved girls under 18, including 627 unions with girls younger than 15.
The actual percentage may be significantly higher since many marriages went unrecorded amid wartime disruption, explained Amal Siyam, who heads the Women’s Affairs Center in Gaza. Marriage contracts processed by the court fell by 35% in 2024, the first complete year following the October 7, 2023 attack by Hamas that sparked the war.
The Associated Press interviewed six girls in Gaza who married between ages 13 and 16, along with their parents, all requesting anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the topic. The AP maintains a policy of not identifying sexual assault victims. Majda consented to using only her first name.
Every parent stated they would never have considered arranging such early marriages for their daughters without the war’s circumstances.
Following the deaths of her husband and son in separate bombing incidents in April 2024, Majda fell into deep depression.
She pleaded with medical staff for sleeping medication, which left her unconscious for extended periods. She became unable to care for her daughters in their makeshift seaside shelter, which was constantly battered by harsh weather. Food distribution from charitable organizations, their primary sustenance source, was unreliable and infrequent.
“I was entirely shaken from the inside,” Majda said.
Two brothers in their twenties, from a family that had lived near them in Gaza City before displacement forced everyone to flee, requested permission to marry her daughters.
Despite having married at 14 herself, Majda wanted to spare her girls the same experience. However, her father sided with the brothers’ family, insisting this was their only option. They assured Majda that while marriage contracts would be signed, the girls could remain with her until after the war ended.
“I was not in my right mind. I am still not in my right mind,” Majda said. “I don’t know how I agreed to this.”
Majda’s older daughter, then 14, resisted the arrangement. “I felt lost,” the daughter recalled. “I thought if I got married, someone would be financially responsible for me … I truly regretted it.”
Most girls interviewed by the AP said their parents didn’t force them into marriage. However, they felt obligated to reduce their families’ financial strain.
Marriage allowed them to be classified as separate households with their husbands for aid distribution purposes, rather than remaining under their parents’ allocation. Several girls also mentioned that with schools mostly closed during the conflict, they saw no possibility of continuing their studies.
One girl described being displaced over 25 times with her parents and seven siblings during the war. Her father had strongly opposed early marriage and hoped she would attend university. But their desperate situation led him to accept a marriage proposal.
She also agreed to the arrangement at age 16.
“I couldn’t forgive myself for taking a share of the little food my family had,” she explained. She also feared that she and her siblings would be left without support if their parents died in airstrikes. Now 17, she was five months pregnant during her interview with the AP.
Another girl mentioned her family’s numerous relocations, each depleting their limited resources. While sheltering at a hospital in Khan Younis, a 25-year-old man there proposed to her. At 17, she accepted.
“Marriage felt like the only sense of normalcy I could restore to my life,” she said.
Gaza law permits exceptions to the 17-year minimum age with parental approval and judicial authorization. The Supreme Shariah Court has established guidelines preventing court officials from approving exceptions for girls under 14 years and seven months.
However, parents sometimes make informal arrangements without official registration. Two mothers interviewed by the AP chose this route, one after an official rejected her request because her daughter was only 14.
In the Israeli-controlled West Bank, Palestinian authorities established an 18-year minimum age in 2019, and early marriages have dropped dramatically to approximately 5%, according to government data.
Siyam noted that during periods of widespread displacement in conflicts with Israel, some Palestinians have viewed marriage as a way to provide stability for their daughters. “Wars and conflicts lead to a return to more conservative traditions,” she observed.
Girls who marry young face greater risks of sexual violence and abuse, including mistreatment from in-laws who burden them with household duties, Siyam explained. Given the high divorce rates in early marriages, “the girl ends up returning home with one or two children.”
Majda said the in-laws violated their agreement and soon demanded her older daughter join her 23-year-old husband, who was staying in his family’s tents in Deir al-Balah.
During the initial 10 days, the girl screamed whenever her husband came near her. “I kept screaming and he hit me,” the older daughter said.
Eventually, his mother “tied up my hands above my head,” the daughter recalled. Her husband then sexually assaulted her.
Subsequently, he repeatedly threatened to have his mother restrain her if she screamed, she said. She described multiple instances of sexual assault and mentioned being hospitalized once due to bleeding.
Several months later, the family came to collect her 13-year-old sister for her 21-year-old husband. The younger girl “kept screaming that she did not want to get married,” Majda remembered.
The younger sister told the AP that she was also restrained by her mother-in-law and sexually assaulted by her husband. She reported having two miscarriages, both following incidents where her husband kicked her while pregnant.
Majda’s older daughter gave birth to a son. Months later, in November, she escaped, carrying her infant for 15 kilometers (9 miles) to reach her mother’s tent.
Shortly afterward, the younger sister also fled back to Majda. They then learned she was expecting a child.
The maternity section of Awda Hospital in central Gaza experienced an increase in teenage pregnancies during the war, according to department head Yasser Shaaban. Many suffered serious health complications from becoming pregnant at such young ages, he reported.
Additionally, the vast majority were undernourished, as Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid repeatedly pushed Gaza’s population toward starvation.
Four girls interviewed by the AP had given birth, and all experienced dangerous pregnancies or deliveries. Three had suffered at least one miscarriage.
One nearly died during childbirth from severe bleeding, her mother reported. She was 16 and severely malnourished at the time.
“I was unconscious for many days (after birth), and I couldn’t hold my daughter for a while,” the girl said.
Back with their mother, Majda’s daughters were terrified by any mention of returning to their husbands. During an April interview with the AP, her youngest daughter said going back would be like “death.”
Majda described how her younger daughter had previously been chatty and playful. But since her marriage, “she does not talk to anyone, not to her husband and not to me,” she said.
The girls had resumed schooling, but the older daughter felt isolated and ashamed as the only married student with a baby. She described herself as a child raising a child.
“I am tired,” she said. “I want to die.”
Majda faced intense pressure from her father and in-laws, who argued she couldn’t afford to support her daughters, grandson, and expected baby.
While women can divorce their husbands in Gaza, the procedure is costly and complex. Divorce also carries social stigma, particularly for women, and would make future remarriage difficult for the girls.
The in-laws promised Majda that her daughters would receive proper treatment.
Believing she had no alternative, she gave in. The girls returned to their husbands in Gaza City in early May. Majda has been unable to reach her daughters since then.
“They did not want to return,” she said. “They were crying.”
