As the world marks the International Day of Rural Women, recognizing rural women’s contribution to public life and development across the globe, Palestinian women continue to face repression and persecution under Israel’s racist settler-colonial regime, which targets both land and people. Israel’s settler government continues to devise new means of repression, genocide, and ethnic cleansing against Palestinian women and men.

In the Gaza Strip, the ongoing genocidal war has entered its fourth year. Despite the announcement of a ceasefire in October 2025, killing remains a daily practice of the Israeli occupying forces. Palestinian women and men continue to endure siege and starvation as part of the continuing genocide. Most, if not all,  of Gaza’s agricultural land has been destroyed, depriving thousands of rural women of their livelihoods.

In the West Bank, the occupation continues its policy of ethnic cleansing and the forced displacement of Palestinians through a series of crimes and practices that violate international humanitarian law, international human rights law, and international conventions and treaties. Israel denies Palestinian women and men freedom of movement through a system of military checkpoints and barriers that embodies its apartheid regime. At the same time, the Israeli government arms and protects settler militias as they attack Palestinians across the West Bank, particularly in rural areas.

These attacks primarily target people working in agriculture. Palestinian women are among those most severely affected, as 60% of working women in Palestine are employed in the agricultural sector. Settler attacks have intensified since the beginning of this month, particularly against women and men picking olives. As a result, Palestinians risk losing this year’s olive harvest, deepening the economic hardship faced by rural families.

The violence does not stop there. Israeli forces and settler militias have uprooted, cut down, and damaged olive trees - both a source of income for Palestinian families and a symbol of Palestinian national identity. According to reports by the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, 85,345 olive trees in the West Bank were uprooted, cut down, vandalised, or otherwise damaged between the beginning of 2026 and the end of September. During the same period, approximately 6,635 dunams of land were confiscated or seized. The Commission also documented the displacement of 26 Bedouin communities during the first half of the year: 18 were displaced in full and eight in part.

These violations and crimes form part of Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing. The repression and abuse of Palestinian women and men have even become campaign material for Zionist parties competing in the Knesset elections scheduled for 27 October.

These practices continue amid the silence of the United Nations and its failure to act on its own resolutions. Foremost among them is the resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2024 under the Uniting for Peace mechanism, which called on Israel to end its occupation of the Palestinian territory within no more than 12 months. That deadline passed in September 2025 without compliance. The United Nations has likewise taken no concrete steps to implement the advisory opinion issued by the International Court of Justice in July 2024, which affirmed that Israel’s continued occupation of the Palestinian territory is unlawful and must end as rapidly as possible.

As a Palestinian feminist, human rights, and development organisation working to advance justice and protect women’s rights based on national and international frameworks and principles, Palestinian Working Woman Society for Development:

• Calls on the United Nations to intervene without delay to provide international protection for the Palestinian people, especially women and, in particular, rural women. It further calls for the activation of Chapter VII of the UN Charter to compel Israel, the occupying power, to comply with international resolutions and end its violations and crimes against Palestinian women and men.
• Calls on all states to impose an economic boycott on Israel and, in particular, to ban settlement products. Israeli settlements violate international law and international humanitarian law and are built at the expense of Palestinian agricultural land, depriving Palestinians of natural resources, including land and water. Waste from factories located in some settlements also contributes significantly to environmental destruction and the contamination of groundwater, further intensifying the suffering of the Palestinian people.
• Calls on the Palestinian Authority to act urgently to pursue the violations committed by the Israeli government before the International Criminal Court, provide the Court with documented evidence, and work with states and other influential actors to secure binding UN Security Council resolutions that put an end to Israel’s violations and crimes.
• Calls on Palestinian governmental and civil society institutions to provide protection and support to rural women so they can remain on their land. It also calls on local authorities and active community groups in rural areas to establish community protection committees to confront settler attacks and to mobilise support for these committees from international solidarity movements.
• Calls on Palestinian civil society organisations to launch a global campaign exposing Israel’s violations against women in general and rural women in particular, to build international public support for Palestinian women and pressure governments worldwide to fulfil their responsibilities by imposing sanctions and international isolation on Israel.
• Stresses the need to establish a global network of international solidarity movements, particularly feminist movements, to expose Israel’s practices and crimes against Palestinian women; to declare Israel a state hostile to women’s rights; and to hold it accountable for its systematic violations of the principles of the Women, Peace and Security agenda.