Transcript:
With Gaza child marriages on the rise, who is to blame?
Israel, of course. Just ask the Associated Press.
According to the wire service, it’s not the Palestinian parents agreeing to marry off their children or the mothers-in-law who allegedly tied the children up as their sons raped the 13- and 14-year-old girls who are responsible for these shameful crimes—it’s Israel.
“The devastation that Israel’s campaign has wreaked in Gaza has helped fuel an increase in marriages of young girls,” writes the AP. “With almost the entire population driven from their homes, most living in squalid camps and dependent on aid, some parents have sought some financial stability for their teen daughters by giving them away in marriage.” All of them, proclaims the AP, “said that if not for the war, they would have never resorted to marrying off their daughters so young.”
It’s nothing new for the AP to strip Palestinians of agency or responsibility.
But blaming Israel’s response to the October 7 atrocities for the rape of young Palestinian girls by adult Palestinian men is a new low. By holding the Gazan parents who enabled the underage unions as exempt from responsibility, and blaming Israel for the parents’ decisions, the AP treats Palestinian adults like children.
It also ignores that child marriage has long been rampant in the region, such as in Yemen and Sudan, where rates are particularly high.
The AP suggests that Israel is responsible for a rise in child marriages in Gaza from 17.8% in 2022 to 20.6% in 2024 and 2025, an increase of 2.8%.
It ignores the even greater increase of 3.2% from 2018 to 2019—years before Israel’s post-October 7 war against Hamas.
The AP takes the parents’ word that the war made them do it, displaying no journalistic interest in why the problem of child marriage has long been pernicious in Gaza and spiked years before the war.
See also “CAMERA Op-Ed: No Lie Too Extreme“