Trigger Warning – Discussion of murder, captivity, torture and state violence against women
Last year, on International Women’s Day, I wrote about the women of October 7th including Shiri Bibas, Emily Damari, Rachel Goldberg-Polin. I wrote about the silent screams I felt walking through the ruins of Kfar Aza. I wrote because I couldn’t not write. Because silence, I’ve come to believe, is not neutrality. Silence is a choice, and it has consequences. Of course, we are now living in a time when speaking out has consequences too – but people also have to decide which side of history that they want to be on.
This year, as International Women’s Day 2026 arrives, I find myself returning to the same question that kept me up after October 7th: what happens to women when the world decides their suffering is too complicated to address? What is the price of that silence for them, for us, for everyone who claims to care about women’s rights?
To answer that question, I want to tell you about a nineteen-year-old girl from Modi’in and revisit October 7th. And I want to tell you about the women of Iran, who have been screaming into the void for decades, long before anyone was listening.
Noa Marciano
Noa had a beautiful smile. She was the kind of person who lit up a room. She was described as a happy, optimistic young woman. Noa Marciano, 19, served as an observation soldier at the Nahal Oz, an IDF base near Gaza, in the Border Defense Corps’s 414th unit. She was, in other words, a lookout – not a combat soldier. Her job was literally to watch. To see. To sound the alarm. On December 9th, 2025, I visited Nahal Oz in Israel as her father, Avi Marciano, took us on a tour that would leave our group in tears.
On the morning of October 7th, 2023, as Hamas began its coordinated assault, Noa and her fellow soldiers at Nahal Oz were among the first to know what was happening. She was one of seven female soldiers abducted from the base during Hamas’s assault, most in their pajamas, as her father recounted.
Her mother, Adi, described the phone ringing at 6:30 in the morning. Noa was in a safe room with friends, still in pajamas, her voice just above a whisper. “There’s been an infiltration,” she told her mother. She said she had to stay quiet. She hung up.
It was the last conversation they would ever have.
For weeks, Adi Marciano didn’t know if her daughter was alive. In an interview with Ynet a few weeks after Noa was kidnapped, Adi said she wanted Noa to know “that I miss her and want her to come home. My instincts tell me that she is still alive. She’s probably watching over the little kids.” She worried: “Does she have her glasses? Are they hurting her?”
A mother asking whether her daughter has her glasses. I have read that quote a hundred times and it still breaks something in me. Hearing her father recount the story first hand, is equally heart wrenching.
A week after the October 7th attacks, a photograph was released showing a bound Noa with three other hostages. A week after that, the Marciano family was officially told that she had been kidnapped and taken into Gaza.
Then came the news that she had been wounded in an airstrike and taken to Shifa Hospital. The pathology report stated that Noa was injured by the strike, but not in a life-threatening manner.
She was injured. She was alive. She was taken to a hospital.
And then she was murdered.
I need to stop on that sentence for a moment. She was taken to a hospital. A place meant for the sick, for the wounded, for the suffering. A place that has existed throughout human history as a sanctuary – the one place on earth where, regardless of who you are or what war you belong to, someone is supposed to try to save your life, and yet, they didn’t save hers.
The story came to me in a way that felt almost unbearably close to home.
Shai DeLuca. The same man who called me at 7am on October 7th, 2023. The same man who was in a bomb shelter at Tel Aviv airport, telling me that Israel was under attack. He is the one who first brought Avi Marciano’s words to the world and we were with him as he translated the grieving father’s story. I think about that constantly how the threads of this tragedy keep pulling tighter, keep finding their way back to each other, keep demanding that none of us look away.
Noa’s father, Avi, disclosed for the first time during our visit that he had received a video of his daughter’s murder via the social media platform Telegram. The footage showed a civilian pharmacist or medical professional at Shifa Hospital deliberately injecting air into his daughter’s veins as she lay on a hospital bed, pleading for her life. “Noa is begging for her life,” he said of the video, adding that by the end of the clip, “she’s sweating but there’s no life to her body.” I saw my friend’s lips tighten before he translated the story. It was almost imperceptible, but I know him.
Marciano also said: “A parent should never learn of their child’s fate this way. Never.” He went on to say that there are still days that he wakes up to that video in his head. He can delete it, but it will never be erased from his memory.
Noa Marciano, the eldest of three children, was buried on November 17th, 2023, at Modi’in Military Cemetery.
Her mother said at the announcement of her killer’s elimination: “She was a beloved child, full of light, sensitivity, and joy of life, and her absence accompanies us every day and with every breath.”
She was nineteen years old. She was watching. And for so long, the world was not watching back.
Nothing will bring her back. But, that day, December 9th, we were given a gift by a friend of the family. She told us that Noa’s favourite saying is “Smile like there is no tomorrow”. Noa didn’t have a tomorrow of her own, but her beautiful smile lives on.
The Women the IRGC Fear Most
Half a world away, in a country with a completely different history, language, and conflict, another group of women has been paying the price of the world’s short attention span for decades.
You may know the name Mahsa Jina Amini. On September 16th, 2022, this 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman died in the custody of Iran’s morality police after being detained for allegedly wearing her hijab incorrectly. Her death lit a fire. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement swept across Iran and became the largest uprising against the Islamic Republic in its history. The crackdown that followed killed more than 500 people and led to the detention of more than 22,000.
And then, as the world so often does, it moved on.
But the women of Iran did not.
Three years after Mahsa Jina Amini’s death in police custody, Iranian women keep pushing back against state control, even as the Islamic Republic detains more women’s rights defenders than almost any other country in the world. The regime’s response to this defiance has not been to soften. It has been to escalate with laws, with technology, and with blood.
In late 2024, Iran passed what can only be described as a war on its own women. The “Law on Protecting the Family through the Promotion of the Culture of Chastity and Hijab” is a piece of legislation containing 74 articles. It imposed the death penalty, flogging, exorbitant fines, harsh prison sentences, travel bans, and restrictions on education and employment for women and girls who defy compulsory veiling laws. The law also includes penalties for business owners and civil servants who do not report violations to authorities. In other words: the entire country is now being recruited as an informer.
Think about what that means. A woman walks into a café. The owner of that café can be fined, or imprisoned for serving her without checking that her headscarf is correctly positioned. The Center for Human Rights in Iran documented that at least 50 establishments, including cafes, restaurants, wedding halls, and clothing boutiques, were sealed by authorities between late June and early October 2025 under the pretext of “improper hijab.” It is one thing for a woman to choose to wear a hijab. It is beautiful when it’s the choice of a proud Muslim woman. It’s tragic when it’s imposed.
Shortly after, it introduced the Nazer mobile application so that citizens could report hijab violations. Drones fly overhead. Cameras watch the streets. A woman’s phone can receive a warning message because a camera glimpsed her hair through a car window.
When you read it – it almost sounds absurd. What kind of government would do something like that?
A government that knows it is losing.
The numbers are staggering and they deserve to be named plainly. In the Persian calendar year 2024, the Iranian regime took punitive action against at least 30,642 women for not adhering to mandatory hijab rules. At least 1,050 people were executed. Over 30,000 women faced punitive measures. At least 31 women were executed in Iran last year alone. Of the 19 executed for murder, nine had been convicted of killing their husbands in cases involving domestic violence or forced marriage – areas in which Iranian women have no legal protections.
Femicide cases surged, with 179 reported in 2024 compared to 55 the year before – many stemming from so-called “honour” crimes or family disputes involving women seeking divorce or rejecting marriage proposals.
And then there is Narges Mohammadi. A Nobel Peace Prize laureate. A woman who has spent years of her life in Evin Prison for the crime of advocating for other women. She wrote her Nobel acceptance speech from behind bars, had her children accept the prize on her behalf, and continues to speak, even from a cell, about the women who are suffering alongside her. Women’s rights activists such as Sharifeh Mohammadi have been resentenced to death after unfair trials and credible reports of torture.
Conditions for women defenders in Iran’s prisons are deliberately cruel. Reports of torture and other ill-treatment are widespread.
And yet women are walking out their front doors every morning knowing exactly what might happen to them for demanding their rights. They are doing it anyway. We know that this year, there are estimates that at least 30,000 civilians were murdered by the IRGC for simply wanting what we sometimes take for granted in Western society – basic human rights.
Iran is a great nation – and while some of us are holding our breath, hoping that it will recapture the culture and diversity that it once enjoyed before the 1979 Revolution, others are either ignoring it or denying the silent screams of Iranian women.
Connecting the Dots
I have been thinking about what connects Noa Marciano and the women of Iran, and it is not the obvious things. It is not politics, or religion, or geography. It is something more specific and more painful.
It is the particular cruelty of being harmed in a place that was supposed to be safe.
Noa was killed in a hospital. The women of Iran are surveilled in their own streets, in their own homes, in the cafés where they meet their friends. The places that should offer protection. And the world, on the whole, has watched this happen with a kind of helpless discomfort, issuing statements and moving on.
I’ve stood in the ruins of Kfar Aza. I’ve felt the silence there. The silence of people who can no longer speak for themselves. I think about that silence often. I think about how it is not so different from the silence that surrounds the women of Iran, who are not silent at all, who are in fact screaming for freedom.
Noa Marciano was trained to be a witness. To watch. To see. To refuse to look away even when what she saw was dangerous. She did that job until the very end. The question International Women’s Day poses to us every year, but especially this year is whether we will do the same.
These women are not asking for our pity. They are asking for our attention. They are asking us to bear witness. To tell the stories of those who cannot tell their own. That bravery isn’t always loud.
The women of October 7th taught me that. Shiri Bibas, clutching her babies, showed me what heroism looks like when there is no escape route. Rachel Goldberg-Polin showed me what a mother’s love looks like when it has nowhere left to go but forward. And now, Noa, a girl with joyful dimples and a beautiful smile, a lookout who saw everything coming is showing me what it costs when the world refuses to watch back.
The women of Iran demonstrate in the streets, hair uncovered, knowing what it might cost them, and they do it anyway. And it is costing them their lives right now.
The theme of International Women’s Day 2026 is “‘Give To Gain’, underscores the principle that meaningful progress on gender equality requires deliberate contributions from governments, institutions and individuals. When we invest in women’s safety, rights and leadership, we strengthen societies as a whole.”
With that being the theme, how can we stay silent and what will that silence cost women?
