The Numbers Are Ugly and Specific

Before Hamas launched its October 7, 2023 attack and Israel's military response began, child marriage in Gaza was actually going in the right direction.

According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 17.8% of marriages in Gaza in 2022 involved a girl under 18. That was down from over 22% in 2015. Progress — slow, but real.

That progress is now gone.

The Supreme Shariah Court in Gaza — where marriages are officially registered — provided data to the Associated Press after a direct request. The numbers: 20.6% of the 35,474 marriages recorded across 2024 and 2025 involved a girl under 18. That includes 627 marriages of girls under 15.

Six hundred and twenty-seven girls under 15 years old, married off, in under two years.

The Real Number Is Probably Worse

Those court figures only capture registered marriages. Amal Siyam, director of the Women's Affairs Center in Gaza, told AP that the actual rate is likely far higher — because the chaos of war means many marriages were never registered at all.

The Supreme Shariah Court's own records show total marriage contracts dropped 35% in 2024, the first full year of the war. Fewer people registering doesn't mean fewer people marrying. It means fewer people bothering with paperwork when they're surviving in a tent.

One Mother's Story

AP News reported the story of a woman identified only as Majda — her husband and eldest son killed by Israeli airstrikes, living in a tent with rats and raw sewage, unable to feed her remaining children.

She married off her 13- and 14-year-old daughters to men who promised safety and financial support.

"I thought I was protecting them," Majda said. "Fear was slaughtering me."

Both daughters ended up in abusive situations. Majda says she deeply regrets the decision.

AP spoke to six girls total who married between ages 13 and 16 and their parents. All required anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.

What's Driving This

The logic, as brutal as it is, isn't hard to follow. With almost the entire Gaza population displaced — most living in crowded, dangerous camps dependent on international aid — some parents see marriage as a survival mechanism.

A daughter married off means one fewer mouth to feed. It means a husband who theoretically provides shelter and protection. It means the girl doesn't have to walk to a communal latrine at night through a camp packed with strangers.

None of that logic makes it okay. And for the girls themselves, early marriage means the end of education, high-risk pregnancies on malnourished bodies, physical and sexual abuse, and — when the marriages fail, which they often do — coming home with a baby and no support network.

The minimum legal age for marriage in Gaza is 17, with some exceptions. The United Nations and most humanitarian organizations define any marriage of a girl under 18 as "early marriage." Under any definition, what's happening here is a catastrophe for girls.

What Mainstream Coverage Gets Wrong

Left-leaning outlets are covering this — AP did the legwork here and the reporting is solid — but the framing tends to center exclusively on Israeli military action as the cause, while treating Hamas's governance, cultural practices, and the pre-existing legal framework enabling child marriage as background noise.

Both things are true simultaneously: Israel's campaign has caused enormous displacement and suffering, AND the legal and cultural infrastructure that allows girls as young as 13 to be legally married was already in place before a single bomb dropped. Gaza's minimum marriage age of 17 with court-approved exceptions is itself inadequate — and courts were approving child marriages before the war, just at lower rates.

Nobody in the mainstream coverage wants to say clearly: this is a society where marrying off a 14-year-old was already legal and practiced. War made it worse. Both facts matter.

Right-leaning outlets, meanwhile, have largely ignored this story entirely — which is its own kind of bias. Child marriage is a human rights catastrophe regardless of who's doing it or where it's happening.

The Reality

These aren't statistics. These are girls who should be in school — if there were schools left to attend — who are instead being handed over to adult men as a financial transaction dressed up as protection.

Some will be pregnant before they turn 15. Some will be beaten. Some will come home with infants and nowhere to go.

The war created the conditions. The law permitted it. The desperation made it feel rational to the parents involved.

None of that excuses it. And the failure to name it plainly — child marriage is abuse — is a disservice to every girl caught in this situation.

When the cameras eventually leave Gaza, these girls will still be there. Married off. Already old.