SAWA National Helpline for Women and Child Protection

SAWA – All the Women Together Today and Tomorrow was founded in August 1998 by eight women trained as volunteers at the Jerusalem Rape Crisis Centre, with the mission of building a Palestinian society free of violence and abuse against women and children. Its flagship service is a free, 24/7 national helpline (short code 164) offering crisis counselling and referral to legal, medical and protection services, delivered by phone, chat, WhatsApp and in person at a counselling centre known as "Let's Talk."

In 2004 SAWA launched a dedicated Palestinian Child Protection Helpline, which joined the global Child Helpline International network in 2005. The organisation also runs mobile psychosocial and reproductive-health clinics for underserved rural communities and school-based gender-based-violence awareness workshops, and since 2018 has been Meta's designated "Trusted Partner" for reporting online gender-based violence and exploitation in Palestine.

The service has repeatedly scaled to meet crisis demand: it handled 200–250 calls a day during the 2008–09 Gaza war and logged 29,618 documented calls during the 2014 Gaza war. Following the escalation from October 2023, SAWA counsellors recorded 1,334 calls in August 2023 rising to 3,148 counselling sessions in November 2023, including a marked rise in men contacting the service and over 2,400 calls about home destruction and 1,125 about displacement across five months, while checkpoint closures forced the suspension of its physical mobile clinics in favour of remote-only support.

No independent evaluation of the helpline's impact on violence outcomes was found — all figures reflect call and session volume, not verified reductions in violence or survivor outcomes. SAWA's own staff have acknowledged a critical gap in the model: "We feel handcuffed because we want to help them, but there is nowhere safe for them to go," a helpline officer told The New Arab, pointing to the absence of safe shelters for gender-based-violence survivors during the current conflict.

Read the full analysis: https://sawa.ps/en/page/about-us