Every year on March 8, the world celebrates International Women’s Day with messages of empowerment, resilience, and progress. Social media fills with tributes to women’s achievements, campaigns highlight leadership and equality, and institutions hold events honoring women’s contributions to society.
But this year, celebration feels misplaced.
Because while the world speaks of empowerment, millions of women in war zones are fighting simply to survive. Their bodies, their dignity, and their futures have become casualties of conflicts they did not start and cannot control. This International Women’s Day should not only be about celebration. It should also be a moment of protest — a refusal to ignore the realities faced by women living in war-torn regions.
Across Sudan, Iran, and Palestine, the experiences of women and girls reveal how modern warfare continues to disproportionately harm them, not only through bombs and displacement but through the slow destruction of health systems, education, dignity, and safety.
Sudan: Sexual Violence as a Weapon of War
Since April 2023, Sudan has been engulfed in a brutal conflict between the national army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The war has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced around 11 million. Amid this devastation, women have emerged as some of the most vulnerable victims.
Women’s rights advocates and officials have documented widespread sexual violence throughout the conflict. According to Sudanese authorities, more than 1,800 rape cases were recorded between April 2023 and October 2025 alone — a number that likely represents only a fraction of the true scale, given the stigma and fear that prevent many survivors from reporting such crimes.
Reports suggest that women have been subjected not only to rape but also to sexual slavery, forced marriages, and trafficking across borders into neighboring countries. In many cases, assaults occur during raids on homes and villages, sometimes in front of family members, turning acts of violence into deliberate tools of humiliation and terror.
Victims range across all ages, from elderly women in their eighties to very young children. Researchers from regional rights organizations say the majority of documented cases involve rape, with a significant proportion attributed to RSF fighters.
Activists warn that these attacks are not random but part of a broader strategy to terrorize communities, force displacement, and fracture social structures. Sexual violence becomes a weapon of war — one that leaves deep psychological and generational scars long after the guns fall silent.
Iran: A School Turned Into a Graveyard
In southern Iran, the tragedy of war took the lives of children.
A girls’ school in the city of Minab became the site of a devastating attack that killed 165 people, most of them girls between the ages of seven and twelve. According to local accounts and first responders, the school was struck twice.
After the first explosion, teachers attempted to protect their students by moving them into the school’s prayer hall, believing it would be a safer place. The principal contacted parents, urging them to come quickly and take their children home.
But before many families could arrive, a second strike hit the area where the girls had gathered.
Almost all of those killed were young students who had survived the first blast but were caught in the second. Out of roughly 170 girls present at the school that day, only a small number survived.
For the parents rushing toward the school after receiving desperate phone calls, the journey ended not in relief but in unimaginable grief. A place meant to nurture learning and childhood instead became a symbol of how conflict can erase futures in seconds.
Palestine: When Survival Replaces Life
In Palestinian territories affected by war, the suffering of women often unfolds in quieter but equally devastating ways.
The collapse of healthcare systems has transformed pregnancy and childbirth into life-threatening experiences. By early 2026, an estimated 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women were facing severe shortages of medical care.
Nearly 94 percent of hospitals have been damaged or destroyed, leaving many women with no option but to give birth in overcrowded shelters, tents, or even on the streets without professional assistance.
Medical workers operating under extreme shortages have been forced to perform emergency C-sections under conditions unimaginable in modern healthcare. Some surgeries have reportedly been carried out using the light from mobile phone flashlights due to electricity shortages, and without proper anesthesia or postnatal pain relief.
The consequences have been devastating. By mid-2024, miscarriage rates had increased by approximately 300 percent, largely due to stress, malnutrition, and trauma. Infant mortality has also surged, with many newborns dying within their first day because hospitals lack neonatal intensive care units and even basic supplies such as infant formula.
Beyond healthcare, women are also facing what humanitarian workers describe as a “dignity crisis.” The blockade on hygiene products and damage to water infrastructure have left many women unable to access even the most basic necessities.
Without sanitary products, women have resorted to using scraps of tent fabric, rags, or pieces of baby diapers during menstruation. The absence of clean water for bathing, combined with attempts to suppress menstruation using contraceptive pills in unsanitary conditions, has led to widespread reproductive infections and skin diseases.
Privacy has also disappeared. In overcrowded UNRWA schools or tent camps, thousands of displaced people often share a single toilet, leaving women without safe or private spaces to manage basic hygiene.
In these circumstances, even daily survival requires painful sacrifices. Families must constantly decide whether to spend scarce resources on food, medicine, or hygiene products. In many cases, women and girls eat the least and eat last, sometimes skipping meals entirely so children can be fed.
The Invisible Loss: Education and Dignity In Gaza
War does not only destroy buildings; it dismantles futures.
Experts estimate that even if a permanent peace were achieved today, it could take until 2030 or later for many children in these conflict-affected regions to return to formal education at their appropriate grade level.
Girls are particularly vulnerable to permanent educational disruption. In displacement camps, they are often expected to take on additional domestic responsibilities, caring for younger siblings or helping families survive. Many may never return to school at all.
The commission found that Israeli detention facilities are characterized by systematic sexualized torture. This includes reports of rape, sexual assault, and violence targeting genitals. Survivors have described forced nudity, public humiliation, and the filming of victims by soldiers, sometimes shared online as a form of intimidation and shaming.
A recognition that the fight for women’s rights cannot stop at representation, leadership panels, or inspirational slogans. It must also confront the realities faced by women whose lives are shaped by conflict, displacement, and violence.
Using this day as a form of protest means refusing to sanitize the reality of women’s lives in war. It means acknowledging that while some conversations focus on representation in boardrooms or political offices, millions of women are still struggling for their most fundamental human rights. It means recognising that empowerment cannot exist where safety does not, and that dignity cannot survive in the absence of justice. Protest, in this sense, does not only mean demonstrations in the streets; it means refusing to look away, refusing to reduce these crises to statistics, and refusing to allow the suffering of women in conflict zones to fade from global attention.
International Women’s Day was born out of protest — a demand for rights, recognition, and equality. Returning to that spirit is perhaps the most meaningful tribute we can offer today. Instead of limiting the day to celebration, it should be used to amplify the voices of women whose experiences reveal the unfinished work of gender justice. It should remind the world that progress for some cannot overshadow the devastation faced by others. If this day is truly meant to honour women everywhere, then it must also serve as a call to confront the systems of violence and conflict that continue to endanger their lives and futures.
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