Destitute from war, a mother in Gaza made a fateful choice and gave her young daughters in marriage

DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip -- Majda was destitute. Her husband and eldest son had been killed by Israeli airstrikes. Living in a ragged tent in Gaza with rats and the stench of sewage, she couldn’t support her children and feared her daughters would be harassed going to the communal latrine in a camp with hundreds of strangers.

So she made a decision she now deeply regrets. She married off her 13- and 14-year-old daughters to men who promised safety and support.

“I thought I was protecting them,” she said. “Fear was slaughtering me.”

The devastation that Israel’s campaign has wreaked in Gaza has helped fuel an increase in marriages of young girls, according to experts and official data. With almost the entire population driven from their homes, most living in squalid camps and dependent on aid, some parents have sought some financial stability for their teen daughters by giving them away in marriage.

For the girls, it meant a loss of their childhood and future — and, often, dangerous pregnancies.

For Majda’s daughters, it meant horrific physical abuse.

Before the war, child marriage had been slowly declining in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. In 2022, the last tally released by the bureau, 17.8% of marriages involved a girl under the age of 18, down from more than 22% in 2015.

The minimum legal age for marriage in Gaza is 17, with some exceptions allowed; the U.N. and most humanitarian groups categorize marriages of girls under 18 as early marriage.

That trend appears to have reversed.

After an Associated Press request, the Supreme Shariah Court in Gaza, where marriages are registered, gathered data from court employees. According to its figures, 20.6% of the 35,474 marriages recorded in 2024 and 2025 involved a girl under 18, including 627 marriages of girls under 15.

The real rate could be much higher because many marriages went unregistered during the chaos of the war, said Amal Siyam, director of the Women’s Affairs Center in Gaza. The number of marriage contracts recorded by the court dropped 35% in 2024, the first full year after Hamas' Oct. 7, 2023, attack triggered the war.

The AP spoke to six girls in Gaza who got married between 13 and 16 and their parents, all on condition they not be identified by their full names because of the deep sensitivity of the issue. The AP does not identify rape victims. Majda agreed to be identified by only her first name.

All of the parents said that if not for the war, they would have never resorted to marrying off their daughters so young.

After her husband and son were killed in separate strikes in April 2024, Majda descended into severe depression.

She begged the doctors for sedatives, which kept her asleep for days at a time. She couldn't care for her girls in their patched-up tent by the sea, battered by wind, cold and rain in the winter. Charity kitchens, on which they depended for food, were scarce and irregular.

“I was entirely shaken from the inside,” Majda said.

Two brothers in their 20s, from a family that had been their neighbors in Gaza City before they were all forced to flee, asked to marry her daughters.

Majda, who got married at 14, didn’t want a similar fate for her girls. But her father joined the brothers' family in insisting it was the only way. They promised, Majda said, that they could sign the marriage contracts but wait until after the war to bring the girls to live with their husbands.

“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 eldest daughter, who was 14 at the time, didn’t want to accept. “I felt lost,” the daughter said. “I thought if I got married, someone would be financially responsible for me … I truly regretted it.”

Most of the girls who spoke to the AP said they were not coerced by their parents to marry. But they felt a duty to ease the burden on their families.

By marrying, they were counted with their husbands as a separate family to receive aid from relief groups, rather than being under their parents' allotment. Several girls also said that since schools largely shut down during the war, they saw no hope of continuing their education.

One girl said she and her parents and seven brothers and sisters were displaced more than 25 times during the war. Her father had been totally against early marriage and wanted her to enroll in university. But the family was so desperate that he agreed to a suitor.

She said she agreed as well. She was 16.

“I couldn’t forgive myself for taking a share of the little food my family had,” she said. She also worried that she and her siblings would be left without support if her parents were killed in an airstrike. Now 17, she was five months pregnant when she spoke to the AP.

Another girl also cited her family’s multiple displacements, each draining the little money they had. When they were sheltering at a hospital in Khan Younis, a 25-year-old man staying there asked to marry her. Then 17, she said she agreed.

“Marriage felt like the only sense of normalcy I could restore to my life,” she said.

The law in Gaza allows exceptions to the minimum age of 17 with parental consent and authorization by a judge. The Supreme Shariah Court has rules for court officials not to approve exceptions below the age of 14 years and seven months.

But parents sometimes enter informal agreements without officially registering the marriage. Two mothers who spoke to the AP did so, one of them after an official refused because her daughter was 14.

In the Israeli-occupied West Bank, the Palestinian Authority in 2019 set the minimum age at 18, and early marriages have plunged since to around 5%, according to official statistics.

Siyam said that at times of widespread displacement in conflicts with Israel, some Palestinians have seen marriage as a way to bring stability for their daughters. “Wars and conflicts lead to a return to more conservative traditions,” she said.

Younger girls who marry are more vulnerable to rape and violence, including abuse from in-laws as they load household chores on them, Siyam said. Because divorce rates in early marriages are high, “the girl ends up returning home with one or two children.”

Majda said the in-laws broke their promise and soon demanded her elder daughter be brought to her 23-year-old husband, who was living in his family's tents in Deir al-Balah.

For the first 10 days, the girl screamed whenever her husband approached her. “I kept screaming and he hit me,” the elder daughter said.

Eventually, his mother “tied up my hands above my head,” the daughter said. The husband then raped her.

After that, he repeatedly threatened to bring his mother to tie her up if she screamed, she said. She recounted repeated instances of rape and said on one occasion, she had to be taken to the hospital with bleeding.

A few months later, the family came to take her 13-year-old sister to join her 21-year-old husband. She “kept screaming that she did not want to get married,” Majda recalled.

The younger sister told the AP that she too was tied up by her mother-in-law and raped by her husband. She said she had two miscarriages, both after her husband kicked her while she was pregnant.

Majda’s elder daughter gave birth to a son. Months later, in November, she fled, carrying her son for 15 kilometers (9 miles) to her mother’s tent.

Not long after that, the younger sister also fled back to Majda. They then discovered that she was pregnant.

The maternity ward of Awda Hospital in central Gaza saw an increase in the rate of teenage pregnancies during the war, said the ward’s head, Yasser Shaaban. Many suffered severe health complications from getting pregnant so young, he said.

On top of that, the vast majority were malnourished, as Israeli restrictions on aid drove Gaza’s population to the brink of famine at times.

Four of the girls who spoke to the AP had given birth, and all described dangerous pregnancies or births. Three had at least one miscarriage.

One of them almost died during childbirth from severe bleeding, her mother said. 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 at any talk of going back to their husbands. Speaking to the AP in April, her youngest said returning would be akin to “death.”

Majda said her younger daughter had always been a talkative, playful girl. But since her marriage, “she does not talk to anyone, not to her husband and not to me,” she said.

The girls had returned to school, but the elder said she felt excluded and ashamed because she was the only student who was married with a baby. She described herself as a child mothering a child.

“I am tired,” she said. “I want to die.”

Majda was coming under heavy pressure from her father and her in-laws, who said she couldn’t afford to care for her daughters, the grandson and the baby on the way.

Women can divorce their husbands in Gaza, but the process is expensive and complicated. Divorce also carries stigma, mainly for women, and would make it difficult for the girls to ever remarry.

The in-laws assured Majda that her daughters would be treated well.

Feeling she had no choice, she relented. The girls returned to their husbands, now in Gaza City, in early May. Majda hasn’t been able to contact her daughters since then.

“They did not want to return,” she said. “They were crying.”

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Ezzidin reported from Cairo.