“We have lost touch with our team in #Gaza,” the executive director of UN Women, Sima Bahous, said this weekend. “I am gravely concerned for them and their families. They have already lived through such horrors over the last 21 days and now face another night of bombardment and fear. I echo my @UN colleagues; we need a humanitarian ceasefire now.”
Bahous has expressed sorrow for Gazan women and children many times since Hamas attacked Israel. On October 23, Bahous said she mourned “the tragic loss of our humanitarian and educator colleagues in Gaza. Our deepest condolences go out to their families.” She, and UN Women, have failed to pay the same respects to Israeli women and children slain by Hamas.
Vivian Silver, a peace activist and former director of the Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment, and Cooperation, was taken hostage by Hamas from her home at Kibbutz Be’eri, where terrorists murdered 108 people. “Terrorists have infiltrated Be’eri,” she texted a friend on October 7. “There is shooting and screaming.” That was the last time anyone reported having heard from Silver, a mother, grandmother, and Canadian citizen who volunteered with a humanitarian organization that helped Gaza residents access medical resources in Jerusalem. Silver started Women Wage Peace, a grassroots movement that promotes Israeli–Palestinian peace.
Tamar Kedem Siman Tov, a women’s-rights activist, was killed by Hamas in her home alongside her husband Yonatan, her mother-in-law, Carol Siman Tov, her two six-year-old daughters, Shahar and Arbel, and her four-year-old son, Omer. Hamas terrorists breached the family’s safe room during the October 7 rampage. Hamas also murdered Hannah Katsman’s son, Hayim, and Naama Navon’s son, Gal. Hannah is on the staff of the Center for Women’s Justice, and Naama is a volunteer with Women’s Spirit.
For UN Women to say nothing of the Israeli mothers who died gripping their babies in bomb shelters defeats the notion that an international alliance of women exists to aid all women. Because supporting Israelis dampens UN Women’s pro-Palestinian narrative, Jewish women are pushed aside, their names forgotten, their memories abandoned by a community that claims to defend women’s rights.