There is a particular cruelty to the way modern wars are fought. Not just in their scale or their duration, but in what they have quietly decided about who matters and who doesn’t. Bombs, we are told, do not discriminate. That is true. But the aftermath does, and in that aftermath, women and girls are left holding the wreckage of everything that was supposed to protect them.
676 Million Lives in the Crosshairs
We are living through a moment of extraordinary global violence. The world currently has more active armed conflicts than at any point since 1946. That number alone should stop us cold. We are not in a more dangerous era than the one that produced the Second World War, the Korean War, and dozens of colonial independence struggles simultaneously, and yet somehow, here we are. And somewhere inside that staggering statistic, 676 million women are living within 50 kilometers of deadly conflict. Not near it in some abstract geopolitical sense. Near it, the way you are near something when you can hear it, when the power cuts out because of it, when you have to decide whether to run. That distance, 50 kilometers, has a strange, almost domestic quality when you put it in context. It is the gap between New York City and Newark. It is the daily commute millions make from Delhi to Gurgaon. It is not the far edge of a warzone. It is your neighborhood.
The Escalation Trend: Beyond the Statistics
The numbers that come out of modern conflict zones are hard to absorb without going numb. The UN counted 37,000 civilian deaths across 20 armed conflicts in 2025 alone. Nearly one in five of those civilians was a woman. That fraction might sound like a minority until you do the math and realize it represents roughly 7,400 women killed in a single year, in conflicts that most people in stable countries read about briefly and forget. What the fraction obscures is the trend beneath it. In Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, civilian deaths did not decrease; they rose sharply, even as global numbers edged downward. These are not outliers. They are previews.
Ukraine offers a different kind of data point, one that strips away the idea of linear progress. The first three months of 2026 were the deadliest winter for Ukrainian women and girls since Russia’s full-scale invasion began in 2022. Between January and March, 199 women and girls were killed, more than in the same period of 2025, 2024, and 2023. Four years into a war, the world has largely learned to live alongside women in Ukraine, who are dying faster than before. That is not a plateau. That is an escalation.
The Urbanization of Warfare and Infrastructure Destruction
Part of what makes contemporary warfare so lethal for civilians is its geography. Wars are no longer fought primarily on distant battlefields between standing armies. They are fought in cities. In apartment blocks. In hospitals and schools. In the exact places where women and children are most likely to be sheltering.
This shift is not accidental, and it is not simply a byproduct of messy asymmetric warfare. In Gaza, residential buildings accounted for more than 95 percent of all recorded infrastructure damage as of December 2025. Ninety-five percent. That is not collateral damage in any meaningful sense of the word. That is the residential fabric of a society being systematically destroyed, and the people inside those buildings, the ones who couldn’t evacuate, who had nowhere to go, who were holding children or caring for the elderly, are the ones who died.
By December 2025, 38,000 women and girls had been killed in Gaza. Let that number breathe for a moment before moving on. Thirty-eight thousand. They were killed during airstrikes, drone strikes, and missile fire. They were killed in their homes. They continued to be killed after a ceasefire agreement was reached, because ceasefire agreements and reality have become, in too many conflicts, separate things.
Thirteen-year-old Mona survived a double airstrike that killed her mother, her sister, and her brother. She described sitting on the sixth floor when the seventh floor of her uncle’s apartment was struck first. As she ran toward the screaming, the second shell hit. Her account has the terrible clarity of a child who has had to recite it more than once. It is the kind of testimony that should make international law feel urgent and alive. Instead, it accumulates alongside thousands of others, and the attacks continue.
The Myth of Remote Precision and Legal Impunity
The drone is the defining weapon of this era of warfare, and its rise has coincided with a sharp increase in civilian casualties in areas that had no realistic way to defend against it. In Sudan, the UN reported over 500 civilians killed by drone strikes between January and March of this year alone. The drone carries a particular moral weight; it allows killing at distance, with precision marketed as humane but deployed in ways that suggest the opposite. The precision, it turns out, is often a lie. Or perhaps the precision is real, and the targets were always civilian.
Under international law, there is no ambiguity: attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure are grave violations of human rights. The phrase “grave violations” appears in legal documents, UN reports, and Security Council resolutions with remarkable frequency and with remarkable ineffectiveness. Impunity is not the exception in modern warfare. It is the architecture.
The Tactical Weaponization of Gender-Based Violence
Sexual violence follows war the way disease follows displacement. The connection is not coincidental; it is tactical. In conflicts around the world, rape and other forms of gender-based violence are used deliberately to terrorize populations, destabilize communities, and drive displacement. It is a weapon in the truest sense: deployed with intent, toward strategic ends.
In Sudan, the numbers are devastating. The number of women and girls requiring support after experiencing gender-based violence has nearly doubled in the past two years and quadrupled since the war began. Women and girls are being raped in their homes, on the roads as they flee, at the points where they stop to search for food or water or medical care. There is no safe moment and no safe place.
Globally, the UN verified over 9,300 reported cases of conflict-related sexual violence in 2025, up from 4,600 in 2024. That doubling in a single year is alarming on its own. But the verified number is, by the UN’s own acknowledgment, the tip of the iceberg. Reporting requires safety, stability, and the belief that it will lead to something that someone will listen to, that there will be consequences, that the stigma that still attaches to survivors in many societies will not add a second punishment to the first. Most women experiencing conflict-related sexual violence have no reason to believe any of those conditions exist.
Structural Collapse and Exclusion from Peace
What sits beneath all of these statistics is a structural fact that wars exploit rather than create: women are already less powerful, less protected, and less heard than men, and conflict strips away whatever small protections exist in peacetime. Healthcare collapses, and the particular health needs of women- reproductive care, maternal care, and care for the injuries of sexual violence-disappear first. Schools close, and girls are pulled out earlier and more permanently than boys. Families fragment, and women absorb the labor of keeping what’s left alive, caring for children, for the injured, for the elderly, while navigating danger and trauma that no one is caring for them through.
And then, when the shooting stops or slows, women are largely excluded from the peace tables where the future is decided. The people who survived the war by holding communities together are not the people who get to shape what comes next. There is a habit of treating women’s experiences in conflict as a subcategory, a humanitarian footnote to the main story of geopolitics and military strategy. The data says otherwise.
Women and girls are not peripheral to what modern warfare does. They are central to it, central to the suffering it produces, central to the social fabric it destroys, and entirely marginal to the decisions that start it and end it. The question is not whether this is happening. We have the numbers. We have the names. We have a thirteen-year-old girl describing what she heard just before her family was killed. The question is whether that is enough to matter.
