As tensions escalate in the Middle East, civilians across the region face devastating consequences. In early 2024, missile strikes, drone attacks, and proxy clashes reignited fears of a broader regional war, spilling across Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, and even Iranian cities. Families in northern Israel once again crowd into bomb shelters, re-traumatized by memories of past conflicts. Civilians in Iran face not only the threat of airstrikes but also intensifying repression that silences dissent, even as the government’s abuses of women’s rights are sometimes cynically used to justify foreign military pressure.
Yet beyond headlines about missiles and ultimatums lies a quieter catastrophe. In every conflict zone, women and children bear a unique burden. When men, often the main breadwinners, are lost to fighting, entire families lose their economic foundation. Women must find scarce work in shattered job markets, while prices for food, fuel, and medicine soar. In Iran, this loss is worsened by an economy battered by years of sanctions. Inflation has soared past 40 percent, driving up prices for essentials by as much as 50 percent. Women’s unemployment is double that of men, and far higher for young women. When men are lost to violence, women must provide for children with few options. Many sell possessions, pull kids from school, or rely on aid that often falls short.
Conflict also opens the door to gender-based violence. As seen in Sudan and Ukraine, forced displacement and lawlessness expose women and girls to abuse. In Gaza, Lebanon, and northern Israel, airstrikes and evacuations force thousands into temporary housing, where risks of exploitation rise and justice fades. The trauma of sexual violence leaves scars that last long after any ceasefire.
The trauma does not simply end when the guns fall silent. Conflict-linked PTSD can echo through generations, becoming part of a family’s inheritance which is a pattern painfully familiar from Afghanistan and now echoed in research by the UN. Even basic needs, like safe pregnancy care, become daily struggles under bombardment and sanctions. In Israel’s north, hospitals brace for birth complications as families shelter in place or flee.
These consequences rarely make front pages. Women and children are not at the negotiation tables or behind missile launch buttons, but they remain this conflict’s most enduring casualties. Their stories reveal the hidden cost of war and the urgent need for peace-building and aid that place women at the center.
Tensions have simmered for decades, but the past year brought an alarming escalation. Israel intensified airstrikes targeting Iranian supply lines and proxies such as Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon. Iran stepped up missile and drone attacks on Israeli military and civilian sites. By mid-2025, strikes and counterstrikes have forced thousands back into shelters. In Gaza, Lebanon, and parts of Iran, civilians live under constant threat while struggling with failing infrastructure, blackouts, and shortages of food and medicine.
Inside Iran, the government’s repression of women’s rights movements continues, even as some Western actors cite those abuses to justify military action; an irony not lost on Iranian women facing threats from both bombs and crackdowns. Amnesty International warns that the unprecedented scale of attacks risks “a catastrophic impact on civilians who have nowhere safe to flee.” Amid this devastation, women in Iran, Israel, Gaza, and Lebanon keep families afloat when systems collapse. In Iran, women’s movements run underground networks to share food, find safe shelter, and document abuses. In Israeli towns and Lebanese villages, women organize shelters, donations, and counseling. Internationally, these same voices call for peace and for women to be included in negotiations which echo the aims of UN Security Council Resolution 1325. Yet too often, women’s rights become slogans for foreign policy while actual women’s voices are shut out.
Bombs and sanctions also disrupt the most basic aspects of family life: health and mental well-being. Hospitals struggle to stay open. Families sheltering from attacks worry if they can reach maternity wards. Sanctions worsen shortages of life-saving medicines and equipment. And trauma does not disappear with a truce. Studies show how untreated stress and fear echo through families for generations. Women carrying children under bombardment, raising them amid uncertainty, live with an invisible strain that shapes entire communities long after the headlines fade.
This conflict is described in terms of power and strategy, but the true cost is measured in the daily burdens women and children did not choose to carry. If the world is serious about peace, then their stories must move from the margins to the center. Aid must reach those holding families together. Negotiations must include those who know survival when talks stall. Only by listening to and investing in these voices can the region hope to break the cycles that make war an inheritance instead of a chapter that finally closes.
