DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Majda had no money. Her husband and oldest son were killed by Israeli airstrikes. She lived in a tent in Gaza with rats and the bad smell of sewage. She could not help her children and was afraid her daughters would be hurt going to the shared toilet in a camp with many strangers.

She made a choice she is sorry about now. She married her 13- and 14-year-old daughters to men who said they would keep them safe and help them.

“I thought I was helping them,” she said. “Fear was hurting me.”

Experts and official data say Israel's campaign in Gaza has caused very bad damage and has led to more marriages of young girls. Almost all people have left their homes. Most live in bad camps and need help. Some parents want money safety for their teen daughters, so they give them away in marriage.

For the girls, it meant they lost their childhood and future, and often had dangerous pregnancies.

For Majda’s daughters, it meant very bad hurt.

Before the war, fewer girls got married in Gaza, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said. In 2022, the last count from the bureau, 17.8% of marriages were with a girl under 18, down from more than 22% in 2015.

In Gaza, people can marry at 17. Some exceptions are allowed. The U.N. and most aid groups say girls under 18 who marry are in early marriage.

That trend changed.

A reporter asked, and the court in Gaza got data from court workers. It said that 20.6% of the 35,474 marriages in 2024 and 2025 had a girl under 18, including 627 marriages of girls under 15.

The real number could be much higher because many marriages were not registered during the war, said Amal Siyam, director of the Women’s Affairs Center in Gaza. The number of marriage contracts recorded by the court fell 35% in 2024, the first full year after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack started the war.

Reporters talked to six girls in Gaza. They got married when they were 13 to 16. They also talked to their parents. They did not use their full names because the issue is very sensitive. Reporters do not name rape victims. Majda agreed to use only her first name.

The parents said the war made them marry their daughters very young.

In April 2024, Majda's husband and son were killed in two separate attacks, and Majda became very sad.

She asked the doctors for medicine to help her sleep, and it made her sleep for days. She could not care for her girls in their tent by the sea. In winter, wind, cold, and rain hit the tent. They needed food from charity kitchens, but there was not much food.

“I was very scared,” Majda said.

Two brothers in their 20s, from a family that lived near them in Gaza City before they all had to leave, asked to marry her daughters.

Majda got married at 14. She did not want the same for her girls. But her father joined the brothers’ family and said it was the only way. They promised, Majda said, that they could sign the marriage contracts but wait until after the war to bring the girls to live with their husbands.

“I was not okay. I am still not okay,” Majda said. “I do not know how I said yes to this.”

Majda’s oldest daughter, who was 14 then, did not want to agree. “I felt lost,” the daughter said. “I thought if I got married, someone would help me … I truly felt sorry.”

Most of the girls who talked to reporters said their parents did not make them marry. But they wanted to help their families.

When they got married, they were counted with their husbands as one family to get help from aid groups, not with their parents. Several girls also said that schools were mostly closed during the war, so they had no hope to keep going to school.

One girl said she and her parents and seven brothers and sisters were moved more than 25 times in the war. Her father did not want her to marry early and wanted her to go to university. But the family was very desperate, so he agreed to a suitor.

She said yes. She was 16.

"I could not forgive myself for taking some food from my family," she said. She also worried that she and her brothers and sisters would have no help if her parents were killed in an airstrike. Now 17, she was five months pregnant when she spoke to reporters.

Another girl also said her family moved many times, and each time they lost the little money they had. When they were in a hospital in Khan Younis, a 25-year-old man there asked to marry her. She was 17 then, and she said yes.

"Marriage was the only normal thing I could get back in my life," she said.

In Gaza, the law says 17 is the age. A parent can say yes, and a judge can say yes too. The Supreme Shariah Court says court workers should not say yes for children under 14 years and seven months.

But parents sometimes make simple agreements and do not officially register the marriage. Two mothers spoke to reporters. One of them did so after an official said no because her daughter was 14.

In the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority set the minimum age at 18 in 2019. Now, early marriages are about 5%, according to official statistics.

Siyam said that when many people leave their homes in wars with Israel, some Palestinians think marriage can help their daughters have a safe life. “Wars and conflicts lead to a return to more conservative traditions,” she said.

Girls who marry young can be raped and hurt. In-laws can also abuse them and give them many house chores, Siyam said. Because many early marriages end in divorce, “the girl ends up going back home with one or two children.”

Majda said the family broke their promise and soon wanted her older daughter to go to her 23-year-old husband, who lived in his family’s tents in Deir al-Balah.

For the first 10 days, the girl screamed when her husband came near her. “I kept screaming and he hit me,” the elder daughter said.

Later, his mother “tied up my hands above my head,” the daughter said. The husband then raped her.

After that, he said he would bring his mother to tie her up if she screamed, she said. She said he raped her many times and that one time she had to go to the hospital because she was bleeding.

A few months later, the family came to take her 13-year-old sister to join her 21-year-old husband. She “did not want to get married,” Majda said.

The younger sister said her mother-in-law tied her up and her husband raped her too. She said she had two miscarriages after her husband kicked her when she was pregnant.

Majda’s older daughter had a baby boy. Months later, in November, she ran away with her son to her mother’s tent.

Soon after that, the younger sister also went back to Majda. Then they found out that she was pregnant.

The maternity ward of Awda Hospital in central Gaza had more teenage pregnancies during the war, said the ward's head, Yasser Shaaban. Many had very bad health problems from getting pregnant so young, he said.

Also, most were very hungry, and Israeli rules on aid made Gaza's people almost starve.

Four of the girls who talked to reporters had babies, and all said their pregnancies or births were dangerous. Three had at least one miscarriage.

One of them almost died when she had a baby because she bled a lot, her mother said. She was 16 and very weak because she did not have enough food at the time.

“I was not awake for many days after birth, and I could not hold my daughter for a while,” the girl said.

Majda’s daughters were with their mother. They were very scared when people talked about going back to their husbands. In April, her youngest said going back would be like “death.”

Majda said her younger daughter was always a girl who talked a lot and played a lot. But since her marriage, “she does not talk to anyone, not to her husband and not to me,” she said.

The girls went back to school, but the older girl said she felt left out and sad because she was the only student who was married and had a baby. She said she was like a child with a child.

“I am very tired,” she said. “I want to die.”

Majda's father and her in-laws said she could not care for her daughters, the grandson, and the baby.

Women in Gaza can end their marriages, but it costs a lot and is hard. Divorce is also seen as bad, especially for women, and it would make it hard for the girls to marry again.

Majda's family said her daughters would be okay.

She had no choice, so she gave in. The girls went back to their husbands in Gaza City in early May. Majda has not been able to talk to her daughters since then.

“They did not want to go back,” she said. “They were crying.”

Ezzidin said from Cairo.