“If the war ends, I’ll cry—because I survived by chance.”

In this moving instalment of Women of Resistance, host Sakina Datoo introduces us to Mai Zaki Abdel Hamid, a 23-year-old law graduate from Gaza who has endured four wars in her short life—and emerged with a sense of purpose that no bomb could destroy.

Mai’s story is anchored in memory and belonging. Her father, who passed away in 2011, left her a legacy not of wealth, but of responsibility: a call to reclaim their ancestral home in Ashdod, seized during the Nakba.

“You have a house,” he told her. “You must go and get it.”

Since then, that house has become a symbol—not just of land, but of rootedness, dignity, and defiance.

“We grew up on the idea that this land belongs to us,” Mai says. “We can’t leave it. We have to love it.”

Her story is one of contradictions—between youth and trauma, dreams and despair. After graduating with a degree in law, Mai planned to pursue a master’s in diplomatic relations. She wanted to speak for Palestine. But the war changed everything.

“Now I can’t even imagine leaving,” she admits. “Not when everything is burning.”

And yet, she acts. As Gaza was pummelled, Mai coordinated youth relief campaigns, hosted support sessions for children, baked cookies to distribute in shelters, and stood shoulder-to-shoulder with women shattered by grief. Even after displacement, she picked up where she left off—starting again in Deir el-Balah with nothing but a will to continue.

“I won’t let the eviction stop me from leaving a mark,” she says.

In the studio, Sakina is joined by Ali Azam, co-founder of the Virtues Ethics Foundation. He reflects on Mai’s strength as a living challenge to the moral collapse of global leadership.

“Her story,” he says, “is heartbreaking—but also heart-enriching. It shows what resilience, ethics, and faith look like under fire.”

Mai speaks quietly—but every word lands with weight. She is the voice of a generation that has grown up among ruins and refused to be reduced by them.

“My message to the world? See us. Just see us.”

“We are a people who love life.”

That is Ghazal Hussam Abu Dalal’s message to the world.

In Episode 9 of Women of Resistance, host Sakina Datoo presents the story of a young creative from Gaza—whose life has been defined not only by her work in design and photography, but by the devastation of war, the weight of trauma, and the unrelenting struggle to simply stay alive.

Ghazal, like so many in Gaza, was born into conflict. Her earliest memories include the loss of her uncle in 2004—an event that etched sorrow into a childhood otherwise filled with warmth, family, and dreams of opportunity.

From a young age, she pursued excellence in her studies and later specialised in graphic design, a field she hoped would give her access to the world beyond the siege.

But after October 7, everything changed.

“We left our home under bullets,” she says. “At any moment, we might have died.”

The office she worked at was destroyed. There was no power, no water, and food became impossibly expensive. She tells of days spent scavenging for basics, nights interrupted by explosions, and the heartbreak of hearing about the death of 30 relatives in a single airstrike on her neighbourhood.

Despite all this, Ghazal found strength in service. She began volunteering with children—drawing smiles on their faces through art and play, even as her own heart remained heavy.

“Seeing them laugh was the greatest happiness,” she says.

In the studio, nurse and holistic life coach Farzana Karawalli joins Sakina to explore the psychological toll of such trauma.

“Ghazal isn’t just surviving,” she says, “she’s living a legacy—for her people, her family, and those who didn’t make it.”

The episode is not only a portrait of one woman’s endurance but a mirror held up to the world’s conscience.

“We’re grateful for the protests,” Ghazal says. “But please—don’t stop speaking about us.”

Because, as she reminds us, Palestinians are not defined by their suffering. They are defined by their love of life, their commitment to family, and their refusal to let the bombs dictate who they become.

“We don’t want to die,” she says. “We want to live—with dignity, with dreams, with freedom.”

“Without realising it, we’ve all become fighters.”

In this eighth episode of Women of Resistance, host Sakina Datoo introduces us to Feda Al-Hasanat, a young artist from Gaza who has lived through mass displacement, loss, and war—but who continues to fight back with her paintbrush.

Feda’s story is one of identity reclaimed and memory preserved. Her father spent 14 years in exile, separated from the family by the bureaucracy of occupation. Her uncle was imprisoned for resisting the Israeli army—a fact she once felt ashamed of, until her mother taught her that “not all prisoners are criminals; some are heroes.”

“They want to erase us,” Feda says. “But through our art, our stories, our memories—we resist.”

Her paintings, filled with sorrow and symbolism, chronicle the siege. Since October 7, Feda has lived through airstrikes, displacement, and homelessness. Her home became a shelter for extended family. The nights were marked by the screams of martyrs; the days by uncertainty and survival.

“I think of the girls in tents,” she reflects. “No privacy, no safety—not even a toilet. That’s what war steals.”

And yet, in her words and her work, Feda fights back. Through teaching children, sketching in the dark, and documenting daily life, she defies the occupation’s attempts to silence and erase.

Joining Sakina in studio is Amina-Karine Kermous—a wellness coach and mother of five—who speaks to the emotional toll on women and mothers.

“These women are diamonds,” Amina-Karine says. “They’ve been formed under pressure—and they still shine.”

The conversation turns to how the genocide has been live-streamed, witnessed, and ignored.

“The victims were the wrong colour,” Amina-Karine notes. “That’s why the world looked away.”

But Feda refuses to be invisible.

“We all became fighters,” she says, “even if we didn’t realise it.”

Her art isn’t just personal—it’s national. It’s testimony. It’s survival.

“Tomorrow,” she says, “I want to show the world what they did to us.”

And she will—one painting at a time.

“Drawing is my way to resist the occupation. To prove we exist.”

In this powerful seventh episode of Women of Resistance, host Sakina Datoo brings us the story of 25-year-old Noura AlQasasiya, an artist from Gaza whose brushstrokes capture both the anguish of a besieged people and their refusal to be forgotten.

Raised in the knowledge of her ancestral village Zarnouka, dispossessed since 1948, Noura’s personal and national history are inseparable.

“We learned about the occupation from our parents,” she says, “but we lived it ourselves.” Her dreams of studying fashion abroad were slowly crushed by blockade and siege. “My life,” she says, “is like a swing in a cage.”

After October 7, that cage collapsed. Noura’s home was destroyed. She was displaced multiple times. The trauma of bombings, tents, and death became a constant.

“We don’t live a normal life. Not physically. Not psychologically. Everything collapsed.”

“What scares me more than death is having to live in a world where everyone watched and said nothing.”

With electricity gone and food scarce, Noura clung to what little she could carry—her sketchbook, her iPad, and her colours. She began documenting everything: the bombings, the grief, the faces of her people. Her art became her archive. Her witness. Her resistance.

Studio guest Tareq Othman, a British-Palestinian activist, reflects on the broader role of the diaspora.

“Seeing people like Noura continue to create in the face of so much loss,” he says, “reminds us that Palestinians aren’t just surviving—they’re living, they’re resisting, they’re refusing to be erased.”

The episode also tackles the world’s indifference. Noura’s bitterness is palpable.

“How can people go on with their lives, with their gossip and comforts, while we are being slaughtered?” she asks.

And yet, she doesn’t retreat into silence. She keeps drawing. She keeps hoping.

“My message to the world: don’t stop speaking about us. Share our stories. Because they want to silence every Palestinian voice.”

In Noura’s hands, art is more than beauty—it is memory, protest, and defiance. And as long as her pencil moves, the world cannot say it did not know.

“Why do they kill our children?”

This is the question Insaf Awad returns to, again and again, in this sixth episode of Women of Resistance. A mother of five and a special education teacher in Gaza, Insaf speaks with unwavering clarity about what it means to raise a generation under siege—and to fight for their future with nothing but pencils, prayers, and the will to carry on.

Presented by Sakina Datoo and joined in studio by theatre director Jonathan Chadwick, this episode cuts through the false narratives. Insaf doesn’t just describe the horror that came after October 7—she exposes the lifelong suffocation that defined Gaza even before it.

“The occupation shaped our lives,” she says. “Psychologically. Physically. At every stage.”

From the beating of her brother by Israeli soldiers when he was just seven, to the struggles of attending university through checkpoints and closures, her life is a testament to resistance through learning. And now, amid genocide, she continues to teach. Arabic, English and Maths. The bare minimum. Art, history, science—all gone.

“How will our children understand who they are if they’re not allowed to know their own land?” she asks.

Despite the war, Insaf continues to teach with whatever she has. The children lack electricity, food, and often even homes—but she refuses to let them lose education too. She shields herself from despair by avoiding the news entirely, relying instead on word of mouth, living moment to moment.

But she cannot shield herself from the pain.

Her sister was martyred. Her sister’s children were pulled from under the rubble.

“The children cry at night,” she says. “They call out for their mothers. But their mothers are gone.”

Studio guest Jonathan Chadwick brings a stark perspective.

“To destroy a people, you must erase their future. That’s why the children are being targeted. It’s not accidental—it’s policy.”

He calls it what it is: genocide, theft, and a project of erasure.

“Our voice is weak,” Insaf says. “We need the world to carry it for us. To say: we are a people. We have rights.”

Her message is not one of hopelessness. It is a plea—for solidarity, for pressure, for truth-telling. Because even as homes are turned to dust and lives reduced to rubble, Insaf teaches. She endures.

And in Gaza, that is resistance.

“I fear survival.”

It is a phrase that should not exist. But for Eman Radwan, a mother living in a tent in Gaza, it captures the bitter paradox of life under genocide: the dread not of death, but of living through it.

In this edition of Women of Resistance, presenter Sakina Datoo introduces us to Eman—a woman whose daily life is marked by displacement, hunger, and fear. Since the Israeli bombardment began, she has lost her home, her stability, and the warmth her children once knew. Now, she fights not for comfort, but for basics: clean diapers, milk, blankets, safety.

“We told ourselves we would be gone a week. We left everything behind. We never imagined we wouldn’t return.”

Her son Ashraf was born during the war. She couldn’t even bring baby clothes from home. The nights are freezing. Prices for essentials are impossibly high. At one point, she couldn’t feed her baby for two days.

“It’s not about liking food anymore,” she says. “It’s about staying alive.”

And yet, even as she survives, she fears what survival may bring.

“I don’t want my children to lose limbs, to be burned, to become disabled. I just want them to grow up, study, get married. I want to die of old age—not from bombs.”

Studio guest and broadcaster Tet Kofi joins the discussion to unpack this chilling reality: that for mothers in Gaza, survival itself becomes a burden. He calls it a moment of “cognitive dissonance” for the world—a world that claims to uphold international law while watching families like Eman’s be erased.

“The global order told us justice mattered,” Kofi says. “Now we see—only for some.”

Eman’s voice is not asking for pity. She demands dignity. Equality. A return to normal life, however modest it once was.

“Even if they gave us palaces, it’s not home,” she says. “We want our homes back. Our schools. Our peace.”

“If I hadn’t started baking again, I would have collapsed.”

In this episode of Women of Resistance, we are introduced to Dima Omar al-Buhaisi—a 21-year-old professional baker in Gaza whose resilience has risen alongside her cakes, even as her world falls apart.

As Israeli bombs rained down on her city, Dima returned to her kitchen—not for profit, but for survival.

“They asked me, ‘How can you bake during a war?’” she recounts. Her answer? “Try it. You might find a reason to smile again.”

Before the war, Dima’s cakes were her craft and livelihood. With over 40,000 followers online, she had built a thriving business—one she never imagined would become her emotional anchor through genocide.

“I wasn’t earning anything,” she says. “But when I saw the children smiling—just one cupcake—it kept me going.”

Despite injuries from working over a clay oven, scarcity of ingredients, and the trauma of watching her friends and family die, Dima found strength in flour, sugar, and resilience. Her Instagram became a thread connecting Gaza’s suffering to the outside world. Support poured in—from Bahrain, from strangers abroad, from people who saw in her a symbol of life refusing to bow.

She even innovated: baking eggless, milk-free cakes for hepatitis patients—many of them children infected through Gaza’s contaminated water.

“My existence is my resistance,” she says, echoing the unshakable will that defines so many Palestinian women.

In the studio, Dr. Annie Shah joins host Sakina Datoo to reflect on Dima’s story. “She’s an institution in herself,” Annie Shah says. “In a place torn by war, girls like Dima are the hope that refuses to die.”

Her spark is contagious. Her pain, tangible. And her message, clear.

“We want to live,” Dima insists. “Like any other human being.”

“He doesn’t know what a kitchen is.”

That is how Rawan describes her one-year-old son’s life in Gaza—born into war, raised in displacement.

In this third episode of Women of Resistance, host Sakina Datoo introduces us to Rawan, a 29-year-old accountant and mother of two, whose story reveals the intimate and brutal impact of Israel’s ongoing war on Palestinian families. Once a professional liaising with Israeli import authorities, Rawan left her job when she could no longer bear the daily reminders of injustice. “They can import anything. We face restrictions at every turn,” she says.

But after October 7, things grew worse.

Her home was destroyed. Her family was separated. Her children—Safa, aged five, and Saeed, barely a toddler—have known nothing but tents, scarcity, and fear. “Safa goes to school in a tent,” she explains. “No books, just pencils.” For Saeed, “he’s never seen a door.”

And yet, Rawan persists.

“We send them to school because we refuse to let them win,” she says. “They want us uneducated. But we are not nothing. We are something.”

The episode doesn’t stop at the personal. It widens to the collective trauma—how families like hers faced the terrifying reality of tanks at their doorstep, bullets above their heads, and soldiers shouting them out of their homes. “We were one hundred people in one room,” she recalls. “We thought we were all going to die.”

Studio guest and activist Carole Swords, herself a grandmother, is visibly shaken.

“My great-granddaughter just swam her first 25 metres. And Rawan’s son has never even seen a home.”

Together with Sakina, they reflect on the global silence, the double standards, and the role of women in fighting back—not with weapons, but with voice, memory, and refusal to be erased.

“Don’t stop speaking for us,” Rawan pleads. “Gandhi succeeded because he was persistent. Be persistent.”

And then, in a single moment, it was gone.

In this second episode of Women of Resistance, presenter Sakina Datoo sits down with Hayam, a young woman whose life was obliterated after October 7. Her story is one of painful loss—of people, of place, of purpose. It is also a story of strength, of what it means to keep breathing in a world determined to suffocate you.

“I couldn’t even see a dust on the shelf,” Hayam says, remembering her pharmacy. “I left my heart there.”

Before the war, Hayam was like so many other Palestinian women: educated, ambitious, full of life. She had left Gaza once, to build a life abroad in Turkey—but the pull of home brought her back. “That’s the curse Gaza has on us,” she explains. “I had everything I wanted in Turkey—but I wasn’t happy.”

She returned. She chose Gaza.

Then came the bombs. Her best friend Khaled was killed. Her home was destroyed. The pharmacy—her pride, her joy—was flattened. “After Khaled,” she says, “I didn’t feel any loss anymore. Nothing could compare.”

Joined in the studio by social and political analyst Bushra Shaikh, the episode moves beyond personal tragedy to confront the wider implications. “Where are the feminists?” Bushra asks. “Why are the rights of Palestinian women so easily forgotten?”

Bushra’s words challenge the silence of Western institutions that speak loudly about women’s rights—until those women wear hijabs or live in Gaza. “We treat them as less,” she says. “And that’s a sickness of the modern world.”

Hayam, meanwhile, continues to fight—not for revenge, but for meaning. In the ashes of everything she once knew, she found a reason to rise again: her family, her community, those who still needed her. “It was like being born again,” she says. “I took baby steps.”

This is not a story of recovery. There is no happy ending. Gaza remains under siege, and the trauma has not passed. But in her quiet defiance, in her refusal to disappear, Hayam becomes a symbol of a different kind of resistance—one rooted not in politics, but in presence.

“I just want to die in peace,” she admits at one point. But she doesn’t. She chooses to live. And that, in Gaza, is resistance.

In an emotionally charged conversation conducted across borders and bombs, Farha joins the program remotely, speaking from the fourth location her family has been forced to flee to. Her story is a harrowing glimpse into the lived experience of Palestinians who endure the long shadow of Israeli military aggression — not in statistics or headlines, but in human breath, loss, and courage.

“A year ago, I was living with my mother and sisters, planning for university. Today, I don’t know if there will be a tomorrow.”

Farha recounts how an Israeli strike destroyed her home, injuring her mother and younger sister. She describes nights of terror under the roar of drones, and days spent tending to her wounded family in makeshift shelters. Her voice, though trembling at times, remains composed — a quiet defiance to the chaos outside her door.

Joining in studio is Dr Sukaina Hirji, a UK-based academic and healthcare advocate. Dr Hirji contextualises Farha's account within the broader humanitarian collapse in Gaza, explaining how medical facilities are being targeted or overwhelmed.

“Gaza’s healthcare system is not merely failing — it is being dismantled,” she warns. “Doctors operate without anaesthesia. Children die of treatable wounds. And yet the world watches.”

Sakina Datoo, host and seasoned presenter, steers the conversation with both grace and urgency, pressing for clarity on the intersection between trauma, resistance, and survival. Through her guidance, the episode never drifts into voyeurism or despair. Instead, it remains anchored in the dignity of those resisting — not only through protest, but through the sheer act of living.

Farha's words linger long after the episode ends. She doesn’t ask for pity — only for recognition.

“We want to live. To learn. To be heard.”