Written by Shaista Khan

Delivered at the Women’s Day demonstration in Slough on Saturday, 8 March 2025

Asalam Alaikum, welcome, and thank you for coming. It is a pleasure to be here among people who genuinely care about all women. The suffering of Palestinian women has intensified since October 2023. Western powers, the Zionist regime, and the Western mass media dismiss, overlook, ignore, or justify their pain.

International Women’s Day excludes our sisters living under occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, where there has not even been a ceasefire. Don’t Palestinian women deserve the right to live, work, have families, and be educated? Even before the genocide, under occupation, our sisters were targeted by Israeli soldiers. They were shot on their way to school, university, and markets. They were in their homes when soldiers took them over. They were stopped at checkpoints and forced to give birth on the roadside. Who can forget the horrific phrase “one shot, two kills” — a reference to killing pregnant Palestinian women? There were no human rights for women or children before October 7, 2023.

Since October 2023, we have witnessed the world turn upside down. After 70 years of apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and the dispossession of Palestinians, Israel has taken the opportunity to attempt its final solution: to commit genocide in Gaza and render it uninhabitable for those who survive. Their so-called self-defense and justifications for genocide have only been supported by Western powers.

The United Kingdom, a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, is complicit in this atrocity. Our mainstream media have acted as facilitators, shielding Israel from prosecution and attacking those who dare to speak out.

It is said that 95% of Gaza’s population has been displaced. The Gaza Health Ministry reports that over 60,000 people have been killed—70% of them women and children, including at least 18,000 youngsters. The Lancet medical journal estimates the real number is likely much higher, around 180,000, directly or indirectly killed as a result of Israeli aggression. Why is the UK government ignoring these blatant violations of human rights?

The sheer scale of the violence and suffering is difficult to comprehend. A British UN official who visited North Gaza said he expected the worst, but what he saw was even worse. Countless doctors and medical professionals have described Gaza as something beyond anything they ever imagined witnessing. The majority of the injured are children, many of whom were deliberately targeted by Israeli snipers. Gaza now has the highest number of child amputees in the world, with surgeries performed without anesthesia.

How can we forget the heartbreaking acronym Wounded Child, No Surviving Family? Palestinian children, despite being physically, mentally, and emotionally scarred, are treated as criminals under Zionist law. Even those who survive are not allowed to share their stories. The BBC caved to Zionist pressure and removed a documentary that highlighted the genocide through Palestinian children’s eyes—simply because 13-year-old Abdallah Al Youzuri narrated it.

Women who have survived this onslaught continue to struggle. They lack proper sanitation, food, water, and housing. They must care for their injured families while facing further aggression—kidnapping, torture, murder, and rape. The same atrocities occur in the West Bank. We have heard the testimonies of Palestinian hostages in Israeli jails—accounts of torture, sexual abuse, forced amputations, beatings, and starvation. Yet, Western leaders and media barely acknowledge these crimes. Thousands of Palestinians remain missing, either kidnapped by Israel or buried under rubble.

You would think that the live-streamed genocide of hundreds of thousands of women and children would push governments to act. The UK is legally bound to prevent genocide but has instead enabled it, while mainstream media serve as accomplices. The UK actively aids the bombing by manufacturing parts for the F-35 fighter jets used against Gaza’s civilians.

Freedom of speech, supposedly protected under the European Convention on Human Rights, is under attack. Israel has long assassinated Palestinian journalists with impunity. Before this war, they murdered Shireen Abu Akleh. Now, they have killed over 217 journalists—including many women—since the genocide began.

One such journalist, Ayat, a freelance reporter and podcaster, was killed alongside her family in a bombing. She left behind a haunting message:

“We are human beings like everyone else in the world. We had many big dreams. But today, our dreams are simply that, if we are martyred, we are martyred as one body. That people would recognize us, and we would not be dismembered and put in a bag. Our dreams have become that we would not hear the sound of bombing. We never imagined we would reach this stage, living a life without even the most basic necessities. There are things we cannot talk about. Someday this war will end, and those who survive will tell the world what happened to us.”

Journalists were deliberately targeted to silence the truth and allow Israeli lies to spread unchecked. Meanwhile, our own government has arrested and harassed independent British journalists like Richard Medhurst, Ali Abunimah, Asa Winstanley, and Sarah Wilkinson, simply for exposing the atrocities and UK complicity. Students and activists, such as those protesting at Elbit arms factories, face the same repression.

We, the people, must continue to speak out, take action, and provide support wherever it is needed. We must lobby our MPs and expose media lies and bias. We cannot remain silent because failing to uphold justice will have dire consequences for us all. War criminals must be held accountable, or there will never be peace.

To stop the violence in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, the UK government must immediately suspend all arms shipments and help prosecute those responsible for war crimes. As a signatory to international law and the European Convention on Human Rights, it has a legal and moral duty to do so. Instead, Western media continue to shield Israel, drowning us in propaganda. Now, they want us to normalize Israel’s actions—just as they ignored Netanyahu’s genocidal rhetoric and Trump’s calls for the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

My final message is to remember the Palestinian hostages, Dr. Abu Safiyah, and the women and children who survived the massacres but now live in an unlivable environment. Gaza is a wasteland, filled with rubble, unexploded bombs, and no access to life’s basic necessities.

The destruction of the education system has led to the killings of academics and scholars, including many women. Do not forget the mass graves at Al-Shifa and other hospitals, filled with the bodies of women and children executed by Israeli forces. Do not forget the babies in incubators who died from power cuts, the newborns starved or frozen to death, the elderly and disabled who could not escape.

Remember the elderly couple—Mohammed Fahmi Abu Hussein (70) and Mazyona Hassan Fares Abu Hussein (65)—who were left behind, used as human shields by Israeli forces, and then executed. Remember 24-year-old Muhammed Bhar, a man with Down syndrome and severe autism, who was taken from his family and mauled to death by an IDF dog.

And remember the Flour Massacre, where civilians gathering for food aid were deliberately targeted and slaughtered.

The world reacted with outrage at false stories of beheaded babies and mass rape, yet it remains silent in the face of Israel’s well-documented war crimes. Never forgive, never forget. The Western and Zionist powers claimed, “Never Again.” But it was only never again for some. For Palestinians, it has been again and again.

Let the Palestinian people know that we stand with them. Keep learning, keep spreading the message, and hold our leaders accountable.