“I have been crying for so long, feeling alone and hopeless, wondering why I do not have a brother who would hold me in his arms and make me feel safe; a brother to whom I recount the injustice, oppression and prolonged beatings with batons and sticks I have endured, as if I were not a human being. I would tell him how I have become an old soul in a young body,” wrote Istabrak Baraka, 17, her last words before she was beaten to death by her husband on June 16 in the Gaza Strip.

Baraka, who was three months pregnant, was preparing to take her high school graduation exams when her husband killed her.

The day of her death, police also announced that a woman in her 40s had been killed by her brothers in a dispute over inheritance. On May 23, police officers found the body of a 16-year-old girl buried by a side street in Jabalia, 15 days after she was reported missing. An investigation revealed that she had been killed by her father.

An average of 22 women were lost to domestic violence in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip every year from 2012 to 2019, according to the Palestinian Center for Policy Research and Strategic Studies. The number shot up to 38 in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to stay home, according to the Women's Center for Legal Aid and Counseling. Six women have died from domestic violence so far this year, including one in the West Bank and five in the Gaza Strip, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.