Her hands are full. Lend her yours.

In Her Hands is our campaign to screen women in Gaza for breast cancer. We’re also calling on the UK government to press Israel to let medical supplies into Gaza and to let patients out for treatment.

Imagine

Imagine you’re a mother living in a tent on Gaza’s beach. Nine of you share it: your husband, your children and your brother’s two youngest. Rats and flies. No privacy. No running water. Communal toilets you dread using.

Your children still know hunger. Their moods swing from rage to silence, and every night they wake screaming. They’ve lost their home, their friends, their whole world. They depend on you to hold them together.

They are in your hands.

You’ve lost so much weight since the genocide began, and you’re exhausted all the time. If something changed in your body, would you even notice? Would you think to check your breasts for lumps?

And if you found one, where would you go? Who could you ask, when you don’t want your family to worry? Is there any treatment left in Gaza at all?

Putting women’s health back in their hands

Please watch our short film about breast cancer in Gaza that was made shortly before the genocide began →

This October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month in the UK and Rosy October in Palestine. We’re launching ‘In Her Hands’ to help women in Gaza put their own health first — to learn to check themselves and to get screened.

£90 screens one woman for breast cancer.

Breast cancer in Gaza today

A woman in Gaza speaking to her doctor.

Since 2013, Amos Trust has supported the breast cancer awareness and screening programme at our partner Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City.

Even before the genocide, women in Gaza were three times more likely to die of breast cancer than women in the UK. Many came forward late. Israel blocked radiotherapy equipment from entering Gaza and routinely refused medical evacuations.

Al Ahli’s outreach was led by women who had been through treatment themselves. They reached communities across northern Gaza, taught women how to self-examine and brought women over 40, or otherwise at risk, into the hospital for mammograms.

The hospital had just launched its 2023 screening campaign when the genocide began.

Over the next two years, 34 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals* were destroyed or badly damaged, and 1,700 health workers were killed.° Al Ahli was attacked nine times. Its diagnostic unit was hit twice, but the mammogram survived.

* Source: World Health Organisation 2025
° Source: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2025

With the few functioning hospitals overwhelmed by the injured, cancer diagnosis and treatment stopped. After the ceasefire, Al Ahli relaunched its screening programme in January 2026, with our support. Nine hospitals in Gaza had a mammogram before the genocide. Al Ahli’s is now the only one still working.

The community networks that once carried this work have been torn apart. Today, reaching women in the displacement camps — women who’ve lost so much and hold everyone else together — rests on one highly skilled community outreach worker.

Because of her persistence, 569 women had mammograms between January and June 2026, and 35 were referred for further investigation.

“Women are the backbone of every single family in Gaza.” Maha Hussaini — a journalist from Gaza

For the 35 women referred, the road ahead is hard. Only one government hospital in Gaza can now carry out surgery, and it faces severe shortages of supplies and chemotherapy drugs. There’s still no radiotherapy. An estimated 11,000 cancer patients can’t get the care they need**, and by June only 2,100 of the 18,500 people needing medical evacuation had been allowed to leave. °°

** Source: Aljazeera
°° Source: UNHCO 2026

That’s why catching cancer early matters so much. When treatment is this scarce, early detection and surgery are often a woman’s only hope.