DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Israel’s military campaign and the mass displacement in Gaza have fueled an increase in early marriage, according to official data and experts. Desperate parents are marrying off daughters as young as 13, hoping to give them protection and financial support.
The Associated Press spoke to six girls in Gaza who got married between 13 and 16 and their parents. Two of the girls said they were repeatedly raped and described horrific physical abuse. Four of the girls had given birth and described dangerous pregnancies. Three had at least one miscarriage.
Official data show a rise in early marriage, which had been declining before Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack sparked the war, now paused by a fragile ceasefire.
All of the parents who spoke to the AP said that if not for the war, they would have never resorted to marrying off their daughters so young.
Here are the main takeaways from the report.
A desperate decision led to horrific abuse
The AP spoke to one mother, Majda, who was living in a ragged tent after her husband and eldest son were killed in Israeli airstrikes. Nearly all of Gaza’s population has been driven from their homes, with hundreds of thousands living in squalid tent camps with little safety or privacy, reliant on charities for food.
Destitute and paralyzed by grief, Majda married her daughters off at the ages of 13 and 14 to two brothers in their 20s.
“I thought I was protecting them,” she said. “Fear was slaughtering me.”
The two girls said their husbands raped them and their in-laws beat them. The younger sister said she had two miscarriages, both after her husband kicked her when she was pregnant.
All six girls and their parents spoke on condition they not be identified by their full names because of the deep sensitivity of the issue. The AP does not identify rape victims. Majda agreed to be identified by only her first name.
Majda’s elder daughter gave birth to a son. Months later, she fled, carrying the baby 15 kilometers (9 miles) to her mother’s tent. Not long after that, the younger sister also fled back to Majda. She was pregnant.
Majda came under heavy pressure from her father and her in-laws, who said she couldn’t afford to care for her daughters, the grandson and the new baby on the way.
Feeling she had no choice, she relented. The girls returned to their husbands in early May. Majda hasn’t been able to contact her daughters since then.
“They did not want to return,” she said. “They were crying.”
Marriage is seen as a way to ease the family burden
The law in Gaza allows exceptions to the minimum age of 17 with parental consent and authorization by a judge. Court officials have been told not to approve exceptions below the age of 14 years and seven months, but some parents enter informal agreements that circumvent the rules.
The U.N. and most humanitarian groups categorize marriages of girls under 18 as early marriage.
Most of the girls who spoke to the AP said they were not coerced by their parents to marry. But they felt a duty to ease the burden on their families.
By marrying, they were counted with their husbands as a separate family to receive aid from relief groups, rather than being under their parents’ allotment. Several girls also said that since schools largely shut down during the war, they saw no hope of continuing their education.
“Marriage felt like the only sense of normalcy I could restore to my life,” said a girl who agreed to be married at 17.
Younger girls who marry are more vulnerable to rape and violence, including abuse from in-laws, said Amal Siyam, director of the Women’s Affairs Center in Gaza. Because divorce rates in early marriages are high, “the girl ends up returning home with one or two children,” she said.
Early marriage was declining before the war
Before the war, child marriage had been slowly declining in Gaza, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. In 2022, the last tally released by the bureau, 17.8% of all the marriages involved a girl under the age of 18, down from more than 22% in 2015.
That trend appears to have reversed.
After an AP request, the Supreme Shariah Court in Gaza, where marriages are registered, gathered data from court employees. According to its figures, 20.6% of the 35,474 marriages recorded in 2024 and 2025 involved a girl under 18, including 627 marriages of girls under 15.
The real rate is likely much higher because many marriages have gone unregistered during the chaos of the war, Siyam said. The total number of marriage contracts recorded by the Shariah court dropped 35% in 2024, the first full year of the war.
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Ezzidin reported from Cairo.
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