Beyond response: women leading humanitarian action in Palestine

Across Palestine, women-led organisations continue to sustain their communities through prolonged crisis, genocide and blockade. Their leadership moves between emergency response and long-term care, immediate survival and rebuilding of social and community life. It is grounded in lived experience, collective responsibility and accountability to those most affected. 

This article draws on reflections from two women-led organisations, Sawa Organisation and the Culture and Free Thought Association (CFTA), and explores what women-led humanitarian leadership looks like in practice and how it operates under extreme conditions.

Continuous response in conditions of crisis

Women-led organisations in Palestine have long been at the forefront of responding to crises under occupation, working within and beyond constrained systems to meet urgent needs while sustaining community resilience. Their leadership does not begin or end with emergency response. It is continuous, adaptive and grounded in accountability to those most affected. 

This current emergency has jarred us all, bringing levels of violence greater than expected. It has forced the Sawa team to rethink existing policies, strengthen contingency planning, make more exceptions, and find creative ways to make things (a little) easier for those seeking support.

Sawa’s helpline and adaptive training

At the heart of Sawa’s work in Palestine is the national toll-free helpline, which provides psychosocial support, and medical and legal consultations. Anticipating worst-case scenarios, Sawa prepared for electricity cuts by securing solar panels and laptops, enabling helpline operations to continue from home if staff could not reach the office. 

As call volumes and complexity increased, Sawa adapted its emergency trainings, shifting methodologies to rapidly bring in more experienced counsellors. At the onset, Sawa’s training was slow, intentional and expansive. The 110-hour programme welcomed volunteers from all academic backgrounds, grounding them in a sense of responsibility to their communities while building their capacity to offer primary psychosocial support. But as the emergency deepened, the nature of the work shifted. The calls became heavier, the needs more urgent, and the time to prepare new counsellors grew shorter. In response, Sawa reshaped its approach. A 70-hour training course was developed, to meet the needs of urgent response. It was designed for those already with some experience, focusing on what was needed in the immediacy of crisis and sharpening their skills. Counsellors were equipped to assess mental health conditions, recognise signs of severe distress, and make responsible referrals, all while holding a client-centred approach at the core of their practice.

What changed was not just the length of the training, but its rhythm and intention. It moved from building broad foundations to enabling rapid, grounded response, ensuring that even in urgency, care remained thoughtful, accountable and deeply human. This allowed the helpline to respond faster and more effectively under extreme pressure.

Sustained support amid rising needs

Sawa’s role in facilitating access to material aid became critical during the assault on Gaza, as survival needs dominated calls. In response, Sawa expanded its efforts, sourcing resources across sectors and making 41,457 referrals since 2023. The volume of requests led to the creation of a dedicated role to handle material aid inquiries, allowing counsellors to focus on delivering high-quality mental health and psychosocial support.

Despite constant disruptions and shifting access to services, Sawa maintained and regularly updated referral pathways in coordination with local and international organisations. Its helpline operated without interruption and remained free across historic Palestine. Since the escalation, Sawa has received 390,715 calls and answered 245,977 (63%), reflecting both the scale of need and the organisation’s sustained response under extreme conditions. ‘What are callers saying?’ became the central question guiding daily operations.

Counsellors worked closely with families facing impossible choices in real time. At the beginning of the Israeli military assault, callers were in a panic asking Sawa operators where to find safety: ‘Should we listen to the evacuation orders or not?’ The helpline functions as a form of frontline response, supporting individuals in real time as they navigate impossible decisions. Some of these are: 

• A mother calling to say the Israeli army was close and had nowhere to go.
• A father who angrily cried out to us after his son died of starvation due to the Israeli-imposed siege.
• A woman grieving her family members not returning from the American military aid sites.
• The school girl who was frustrated at being unable to take her exams.
• The parents looking for their missing children.
• The released prisoners from Israeli jails unable to find food or assistance.
• The boy looking for work and aid to take care of his siblings.
• The woman and man who endured sexual harassment from the Israeli soldiers.
• The caregiver who threatened to burn himself and his family members.
• The woman abused by her husband who lost her only source of family support.
• The women facing psychological collapse.
• The men despairing in their inability to provide for their families.
• The orphans calling for help.
• The people with disabilities looking for mobility aids and other equipment.
• The displaced people returning to find their homes and lives demolished.
• The last surviving family member who is unsure what to do with themselves next.

Sawa’s responses adapting to myriad needs

These calls did not end at listening. They shaped how Sawa organised its response in real time. When families called in panic, asking where to go or how to survive the next few hours, counsellors moved beyond emotional support to actively map available services and connect people to what little remained accessible. Repeated calls about starvation, displacement and lack of basic supplies led Sawa to strengthen its referral systems and expand coordination with local and international actors, ensuring faster pathways to food, shelter and medical support. In cases of acute distress, such as caregivers expressing suicidal intent or when speaking to survivors of violence, counsellors applied crisis intervention approaches, conducted immediate risk assessments, and stayed present on the line while coordinating urgent referrals where possible.

Sawa’s support is not always one-off. Where possible, it is relational and ongoing. This is reflected in cases such as Hiam, a blind mother of three navigating displacement and isolation, who first called only seeking material aid and resisted speaking about her emotions. Over time, through consistent, patient engagement, the helpline became a space she trusted, returning not just for assistance but for connection, reflection and release. She began to share her story in her own time, describing the helpline as the only place she could unburden herself and feel at peace. This continuity of care, where callers are met again and again with presence and respect, has shaped Sawa’s approach, reinforcing the importance of building trust over time alongside immediate response.

Together, these experiences have guided operations. Sawa introduced a dedicated role to manage material aid requests, allowing counsellors to focus more deeply on mental health support, while also strengthening training on trauma, grief and crisis response. The helpline has become not just a point of contact, but a living system of care that adapts daily, grounded in both urgent needs and the longer, quieter work of holding people through ongoing crises.

Community-rooted, participatory response

The CFTA provides another example of women-led leadership grounded in community participation. Founded in 1991 by five women in Gaza, CFTA has built its work around the principle that communities must not be spoken for, but must speak for themselves. This approach is reflected in its network of community centres, where women, youth and children define priorities and participate in designing and implementing programmes.

From the first days of the genocide, CFTA mobilised without pause. As offices and centres were damaged, teams repaired and reopened them using whatever was available, from wooden pallets to tents and makeshift structures, despite severe shortages under blockade. These efforts ensured continuity of education, health support and safe spaces for women, youth and children.

At the beginning, displaced people arrived with visible signs of hardship. Some were injured, others, including pregnant women in urgent need of care and children weakened by illness, created immediate human needs that could not wait. Care emerged organically from within the community itself. Among those present was a nurse – a CFTA staff member who had previously worked at the Women’s Health Centre, and who brought her professional experience into this new reality. In that fragile space, expertise met urgency and from a small improvised corner, she began rebuilding basic health services. Step by step, with other professionals, staff and volunteers, what began as an emergency response evolved into a functioning medical centre, shaped by people’s needs, resilience, commitment and collective action, rather than formal structure, eventually offering primary health care, and sexual and reproductive health services.

Working through grief and trauma

The grief endured by the people of Gaza is heavier than what constitutes ‘normal’ grief. It is grieving everything, not only a single loss; it is every family being too weighed down by their own loss to support anyone else. It allows no time to recover. There is constant anticipation of more grief, and it is collective.

Helpline operators listen closely to these emotions every day. Some counsellors experience secondary trauma, as they listen to the outpourings from callers that so resembles their own grief. Palestinian workers in the humanitarian sector are responding, not to ‘beneficiaries’, but to their fellow citizens, their friends, and perhaps their relatives, with a deep sorrow and constant anxiety. Some try to suppress it to continue their daily work. With the situation also deteriorating every day in the West Bank, the grief felt by Gazans is an inner trauma that many do not want to (or cannot) properly acknowledge, even in deep introspection. 

In response, Sawa and CFTA have been intentional about creating structures of care within the organisations. Sawa has done this through regular check-ins within the office, offering space for staff to share how they are coping and to be met with understanding rather than expectation. Staff also have access to mental health support, ensuring they are not left to navigate this burden alone. Sawa has also strengthened peer support systems, created moments for collective debriefing after difficult cases, and adjusted workloads where possible to reduce burnout. 

CFTA has prioritised the wellbeing of staff and volunteers by creating small but meaningful spaces of support within an otherwise overwhelming environment. Through stress-relief activities, psychosocial support, debriefings, and flexible working arrangements adapted to highly unpredictable conditions, the organisation has sought to sustain emotional wellbeing and strengthen collective resilience.

These practices recognise that sustaining care for others requires actively caring for those providing it, especially in a context where the line between personal and professional grief is so blurred.

Conclusion

Women-led organisations in Palestine demonstrate that local humanitarian leadership is not something that needs to be built from scratch: it already exists and is already responding under the most extreme conditions.

Sawa’s helpline and CFTA’s community-based work show that leadership is continuous, adaptive and deeply rooted in lived realities. It operates across emergency response and social support, often without the recognition, resources or structural support afforded to larger humanitarian actors.

For international humanitarian actors, this raises important questions. What would it mean to design responses that build on rather than bypass the leadership that already exists within communities? How can systems adapt to support organisations that are embedded in crisis, rather than external to it? And how can partnerships move beyond consultation towards genuine power-sharing?

As the sector undergoes a broader reset, the experiences of women-led organisations in Palestine offer a clear message: effective humanitarian response is not only about reaching people in crisis, but also about recognising and supporting those who are already leading within it.

Ohaila Shomar is the founder of Sawa Organisation in Palestine and a prominent human rights activist specialising in sexual and gender-based violence. She has established multiple helplines for survivors, authored anti-violence programmes, and provides consultancy on women’s and children’s rights.

Majeda Saqqa is one of the founders of the Culture and Free Thought Association, established in 1991. She is an activist working on rights, justice and community resilience.