Adolescent girls Over 200,000 adolescent girls in Gaza are facing critical food insecurity, with many experiencing acute malnutrition, anemia, and heightened exposure to protection risks.5859 Some women described failing to protect their adolescent daughters from the impact of food insecurity: “As a mother, I tried to shield my daughters from hunger, skipping meals so they could eat. But I watched their bodies grow thinner, their faces pale... I see my daughters struggle to focus, their small frames carrying fatigue they should never know at their age. It feels like we live on the edge of fainting or dying every single day.” The collapse of Gaza’s education system has created additional risks for adolescent girls by removing vital protective spaces. Most schools are damaged or destroyed, leaving girls without classrooms, peer networks, or the daily structures that once shielded them from early marriage and exploitation.60 A social worker explained: “With no schools left standing, girls have lost the one space that offered safety and a future.” Women living in shelters observed the particular dangers for adolescent girls: “There are no washrooms, no privacy, and no dignity. Women and girls wait in lines for hours to use broken toilets, often in unsafe conditions. At night I lie awake, my heart bleeding as I see girls begging for food, exposed to risks that only God knows.” Credit: SOH In some cases, early marriage is emerging as a negative coping mechanism; as families struggle to survive, it can be seen as a way of securing a girl’s future or reducing the number of mouths to feed.61 A 2024 study found that 71 percent of participants in Gaza felt a growing pressure for girls to marry before age 18 as a direct result of poverty, hunger, and school closures.62 A frontline worker confirmed, ”Families under pressure see marriage as the only option, and hunger is accelerating this trend. Education is gone, and with it the protection that kept many girls from being married too young,” and another observed, “We are seeing forced marriages of girls under 16, married for a bag of flour.” Two women disclosed that, since the start of the war, their daughters were married before age 18. “I was forced to marry off my daughter because we had nothing to eat, it was the only way to relieve the burden,” one widow explained. Another woman shared: “My husband, instead of supporting us, forced our seventeen-year-old daughter into marriage without her consent or mine, just to relieve himself of responsibility.” 18