Reem Al-Hajajreh was born in 1982 in Dheisheh, the refugee camp that stretches from the centre of Bethlehem to its outskirts. After finishing high school, Reem enrolled at Al-Quds Open University, where she graduated in Business Administration and Social Work. Her education allowed her to work in offices and companies, but the situation in Palestine — the climate of tension she has breathed since birth — led her to engage with political issues. On more than one occasion, Reem Al-Hajajreh has personally taken a stand for the rights of the Palestinian people, promoting, from the very beginning, the idea of dialogue and reconciliation.
In the meantime, she got married and now has four children. It is above all for them that Reem dedicates herself wholeheartedly to activism, in search of a path that could lead to serenity. Her fear, in fact, is that her children, like others’, might be killed, wounded, or imprisoned by Israeli soldiers.
Soon, Reem realised that on her own she did not have the same strength that many people together could have. Above all, she developed the idea that women are better at dialogue than men: they are more concrete, less quarrelsome, and more focused on practical matters. Yet, in the Middle Eastern political context — particularly in the Israeli-Palestinian one — women are absent. In fact, they are silenced and kept in the background.
For this very reason, in 2021 she founded the association Women of the Sun, a group of Palestinian women who want to try, with their voices, to bring a ray of light into the darkness of war and Israel’s colonial occupation. When she first started talking about it, Reem drew the attention of only a few friends, but as time passed, when the idea took shape and began to materialise, dozens and dozens of women — young, middle-aged, and elderly — gathered around the association.
In an interview with Time magazine, Reem recounted the birth of Women of the Sun:
“We started with a small group of women, and today we are several thousand: we are no longer sitting in the background. The situation in the West Bank and Gaza had already been unbearable for a long time, but it has worsened considerably since 7 October. At that time, we had 2,500 members in the West Bank, where our headquarters is located, and about 300 members in Gaza, where 27 of them have been killed over the past four and a half months.”
In January 2024, Reem Al-Hajajreh and Yael Admi, founder of the Israeli association Women Wage Peace, spoke at the French Parliament, where they urged Israeli and Palestinian leaders to return to negotiations to end the war between Israel and Gaza. In September 2024, she took part in the international conference of the Bled Strategic Forum in Bled, Slovenia, speaking during the session “Reconciliation: Learning from the Past to Build a Fairer Future.”
In December 2024, Reem Al-Hajajreh, together with Pascale Chen of Women Wage Peace, were finalists for the Sakharov Prize and took part in a meeting at the European Parliament, where she explained the purpose of her association.
In Strasbourg, representing the more than 3,500 Palestinian women from the West Bank and Gaza who are part of the Women of the Sun network, Reem explained the meaning of the organisation’s name:
“‘The Sun’ is what we see when our ideas finally come out into the open, after years of darkness — darkness caused, she says, both by the Israeli occupation and by the Palestinian patriarchy.”
“The Palestinian Authority, in fact, does not support women’s actions, and the Israeli occupation has brought the situation to disaster. In Gaza,” Reem explained, “18 women from the Women of the Sun network, including the local coordinator, have been killed. The situation is desperate on a humanitarian, psychological, and social level — a disaster that was predictable. Many of us had already understood what was about to happen. We raised the alarm many times, but we were not heard. The war entered our homes, and we were the first to pay the price.”
And yet, it is precisely Palestinian and Israeli women who could represent a turning point.
“We women are the main link with our children. We can prevent them from making choices that lead to death.”
Today, Reem Al-Hajajreh still lives with her family in the Dheisheh refugee camp, while the offices of Women of the Sun are located in the centre of Bethlehem.
