About the Book

Women of Gaza begins within Randa Al-Dawoudi’s own family.

Looking back on her childhood in Gaza, the loss of her mother and the memories carried within her family, Al-Dawoudi begins to see her own life as part of a much larger story, one passed from woman to woman across generations.From there, the narrative moves through four generations of Palestinian women, from the Nakba of 1948 to 2025, before widening further into the experiences of other women in Gaza.

Their stories reveal history from the places where it becomes most intimate. War and occupation do not remain at borders and checkpoints. They enter marriages, pregnancies, motherhood, childhood, family relationships, religious expectations and the decisions women are permitted to make about their own bodies and lives.

The book does not look at occupation in isolation. It examines what happens when war and political power intersect with patriarchy, religious authority, family loyalty and social expectation, and when several forms of power attempt to shape the same life.

The women in Women of Gaza are never reduced to victims, symbols or examples of resilience. They fall in love, raise children, disagree, laugh, desire, grieve, make mistakes, protect one another and imagine lives beyond the boundaries imposed upon them.

Through memoir, oral history and literary nonfiction, Al-Dawoudi offers a view of Gaza that rarely reaches the outside world: not simply a place where wars happen, but a society lived from within, through bodies, families, relationships, memory and ordinary life.

At the heart of the book is a question that reaches far beyond Palestine:
What happens when history, politics, religion and family all claim a place in the most private territory a woman has, her own life?