World YWCA Calls for Urgent Global Solidarity to Denounce and Act Against Human Suffering in Gaza

In 1959, in Mexico, the World YWCA Council – comprised of community women leaders around the world – passed a resolution on peace. One part stated:

“World order and a climate of peace cannot be established without the growing desire to develop an international public conscience as sensitive to the existence of world disorder as to that of national disorder. YWCAs with other groups of people within the nations must accept their responsibility to support and stimulate governments in their efforts to promote peace… Peace is not only the absence of war. Fear, want or lack of freedom for the individual or the nation, are all threats to peace. We will therefore continue our work towards removing these threats by taking an ever-growing share in the promotion of human rights and fundamental freedoms, of the respect of the right of peoples and nations to self-determination, of better standards of living for all, and of a freer flow of goods, persons and ideas.”

Poverty, hunger, forced displacement, and lack of shelter and safety accompany fear.

The repeated block by the Israeli Occupation on aid delivery to the people of Gaza, including overt and unnecessary barriers, and more subtle political obfuscation by those in power, is a horrible violation of human rights. In 2025, severe acute malnutrition resulting in sickness and death of thousands, with food and safe water available across a constructed border, is not only wholly unacceptable and a stain on humanity – an offense of trauma, human suffering and death. If the siege is not lifted and food and health supplies are not delivered to Gaza immediately, thousands of more children will inevitably die. We should not stand silent and accept this, as a women’s movement. This is shameful to our core values.

World YWCA recognises human suffering as antithetical to human rights.

Mira Rizeq, World YWCA President states, “Our struggle to stop arm production and trade should be intensified if we are true in our mission of saving humanity. “Through the decades of its work, the YWCA global movement has recognised weapons and arms production as an accelerator to human suffering.

World YWCA calls for all YWCA associations and leaders, and every citizen of the world, to act and denounce the human suffering in Gaza, and pressure for an immediate correction of such a horrific assault on fundamental peace and freedoms.

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The global YWCA movement approved and passed the following motions at the World YWCA’s 30th World Council in November of 2023:

WORLD YWCA – Full Statement of Policies

  • Statements linking to Peace in Middle East: Page 88, Statement approved and passed at the 1975 World Council in Vancouver, Canada: Peace: Middle East; Page 89, Resolution approved and passed at the 1983 World Council in Singapore: Peace: Middle East; Page 93, Resolution approved and passed at the 1991 World Council in Stavanger, Norway: Peace: Palestine; Page 95, Resolution  approved and passed at the 1995 World Council in Seoul, Korea: Peace: Middle East; Page 95, Resolution  approved and passed at the 1999 World Council in Cairo, Egypt: Peace: Middle East; Page 95, Resolution approved and passed at the 2003 World Council in Brisbane, Australia: Peace: Middle East; Page 96, Resolution approved and passed at the 2007 World Council in Nairobi, Kenya: Peace: Middle East; Page 97, Call to Action approved and passed at the 2015 World Council in Bangkok, Thailand: Peace: HR STANDARDS AND UNSCR 1325 MIDDLE EAST