An all-female group of charity volunteers from Birmingham have sent gender-specific products to the women in Gaza to “give a little bit of dignity” to those living in the war-torn region.
The team of eight women, working with the charity ISRA-UK, arrived in Cairo, Egypt, on April 1, where they spent a week in a warehouse packing and loading around 3,000 hygiene kits onto a lorry which will be driven across the Rafah border into Gaza.
Each kit is comprised of five packets of sanitary towels, two tubes of toothpaste, a toothbrush, body lotion, hand sanitiser, a few packets of wet wipes and shampoo.
Saraya Hussain, 47, from Birmingham, who led the deployment, told the PA news agency that the team worked “tirelessly” to ensure each box was packed correctly and included handwritten messages of “love, peace and hope for the recipients”.
“Seeing the lorry loaded and ready to go was emotional for many of the team as it was covered with our banner with the simple statement of ‘Women for Gaza’, she said.
“One of the team described it as bittersweet, in that she felt proud that she was able to do something but it equally felt like it was so little.
“The products will be beneficial to everyone, including women, to help them keep clean and give them a little bit of dignity as best as we can while they’re going through such a terrible time.”
Ms Hussain previously told PA how the group had decided to “persevere” with the trip following the news of an Israeli air strike in Gaza which killed seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers on April 1, which she said was “tragic and very, very concerning”.
Three British nationals, James “Jim” Henderson, 33, James Kirby, 47, and John Chapman, 57, were among the seven aid workers killed in strikes after their convoy was hit as it was leaving the Deir al-Balah warehouse.
Ms Hussain said: “These are people that have travelled, given up their time, come away from their families, given up their life’s luxuries if you will, to go and be better people and do better in the world.
“To lose their lives in the process and leave behind multiple families that are mourning and grieving for them in some of the worst circumstances ever is really quite worrying.”
She added: “When we heard of the air strike on Monday night, obviously we were concerned and we had to re-evaluate and say, ‘do we want to go ahead with this?’, and we’ve persevered.”
The all-female team at ISRA-UK, an independent non-governmental organisation (NGO) founded in the UK, embarked on a similar deployment to Turkey in 2023 following the earthquakes in the region.
“What we learnt from that was that largely in conflict and disaster areas, women’s needs, their gender-specific needs, are really often overlooked,” Ms Hussain said.
“People go to the default of food, shelter, the basic human needs we all have in common, but forgetting that there’s an additional layer that women have, which is usually around pregnancy and menstruation.”
Ms Hussain said she had seen reports emerging from Gaza where women were “really suffering with their periods” and using “old rags” and “chopping up old tents” to cope.
“It’s not nice for anybody to have to do something like that, so here we are,” she said.
The products in the hygiene kits had been purchased in Egypt with money raised from public donations to the charity and fundraisers organised by the volunteers in the UK.
The charity has organised an array of deployments and fundraisers for humanitarian aid projects, specifically for people in Gaza in recent months.
Ms Hussain said the organisation has sent trucks of flour, winter clothing and bedding, food parcels and generic hygiene kits over the last few months.