Her Story
West Bank widows carry households alone after Israeli raids
Her StoryGraphic: Times of Palestine
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Shami was in labor at a Nablus hospital on 3 May when Israeli forces shot and killed her husband, 25-year-old Nayef Samaro, on a crowded shopping street minutes from where she was giving birth, NPR reported.
She knelt over his body for a last goodbye, then was taken to the maternity ward; their son, Yaman, was ten days old before she could bring him home to her mother's house, where she was still recovering from a cesarean section when NPR spoke to her.
A widening group with the thinnest income#
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 12 percent of West Bank households as female-headed even before the past two years of raids added to their number, and its most recent labor figures put women's West Bank workforce participation at about 19 percent against 72 percent for men — a gap that turns a husband's death into an economic collapse, not only a personal one.
Women's unemployment in the West Bank stood at 27 percent, PCBS found, roughly level with the 28 percent recorded among men, but starting from a far smaller base of working women to begin with.
What is supposed to help, and where it stalls#
Families of those killed by Israeli forces are formally eligible for Palestinian Authority welfare payments channeled through the Economic Empowerment Fund, but the system now runs on socioeconomic need tests rather than automatic entitlement after President Mahmoud Abbas's 2025 overhaul of the former Martyrs Fund — and PLO welfare staff have flagged cases where a widow with several children and no income has had her allowance halted while single or minor dependents kept receiving payments.
UNRWA and Palestinian civil-society programs offer some cash and vocational support to widows in the interim, but neither replaces a full income.
Shami told NPR that pursuing the case through Israeli courts felt "so out of reach" that her family was not focused on it. What she is focused on, like the growing number of women in her position, is what comes after the funeral: rent, school fees and a newborn who needs feeding, carried on an income that in most West Bank households used to be her husband's.
