The UNFPA Country Office (CO) is based in East Jerusalem, with a sub-office in the Gaza Strip which opened in 2003. There is a clear story of UNFPA’s increasing attention to the response to, the prevention of, and the elimination of GBV across both the development and humanitarian spheres. This GBV work is deeply embedded within the UNFPA Palestine Gender Programme, with a focus on strengthening government and civil society capacity to address GBV, and responding to ad hoc humanitarian crises.
In 2014 UNFPA implemented a two-year Danish-funded “Working Together to Stop Gender-Based Violence” project which is widely credited for ‘putting GBV on the map in Palestine’.
The current UNFPA portfolio of GBV activities is based around five main interacting components of support and interventions:
- Support to the National Referral System (NRS)
- Support to civil society coalitions
- Support to service delivery
- GBV Sub-Cluster Coordination
- Data management through the gender based violence information management system (GBVIMS) and support to the ‘Observatory’.
The Palestine case study provides relevant reflection on the development-humanitarian continuum and UNFPA’s place, role, and opportunities within this. Whilst humanitarian situations are drivers of exacerbating GBV, they are never the underlying cause of GBV, and the utility of a GBV response in recognising this is embedded within an understanding of resilience, prevention, and building back better. The Palestine case highlights the general ineffectiveness of humanitarian architecture, designed for the humanitarian situations which characterised the world forty years ago and which is more and more observably unfit for purpose for many current protracted and complex humanitarian situations.