It was a single word scrawled on a wall at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem that unlocked something deep inside Inbar Michelzon, two years after she had completed compulsory military service in the Israeli Defence Force.

In the next few weeks, the highest-level United Nations official ever to promote the rights and status of women worldwide will be appointed. Peace advocates demand that the new office take on the issue of violence against women in conflict zones, says Barbara Crossette.

A Lebanese aid ship aiming to reach Gaza in defiance of Israel will "probably be delayed," organisers said Saturday, on the eve of its planned departure, after Cyprus denied use of its waters and ports.
The Mariam, a Bolivian-flagged cargo ship renamed for the all-women aid operation, was to have set off from the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli on Sunday night, headed for Cyprus on the first leg of a crossing to Gaza.

Rwanda's FDU-Inkingi Party leader, peace and social justice activist Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, spoke to Ann Garrison for Womens' International News Gathering Service (WINGS) in July 2010, near the close of Rwanda's 2010 presidential election year, which was really an election stage play complete with election observers from the U.S. and the U.K. Incumbent Rwandan President Paul Kagame was “re-elected” on Aug.

International Medical Corps is responding to an incident of mass sexual violence perpetrated by armed groups over the course of four days in a remote village in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. So far, at least 150 women are believed to have been targeted.

The United Nations deputy envoy to Liberia, Henrietta Mensa-Bonsu, today lauded Rwandan police officers serving in the UN mission in the West African country for their professionalism and discipline, saying their presence there had strengthened the capacity and skills of the local police.

A non-profit center for women's rights defense opened in Kirkuk on Sunday under the name of “the Legal Free Center for Women in Kirkuk.”

They are hung from trees by metal chains attached to their arms and provided with plastic bags to collect their urine to drink when they are thirsty. They are gang raped, tortured with electricity and held prisoner in desert camps. When they escape they are shot, either by their Beduin captors or by Egyptian police.

When leading prominent Iraqi women leaders from all across the country gathered in Baghdad in June 28, 2010 they had only one question on their mind: Ela Mata? Until when? The question was directed at leading political parties engaged in negotiations over government formation after the recent elections.

Speaking to IPS from her modest grocery store in Jericho Estate, Nairobi, Chazima recounts how in the early 1990s, her husband sold the house they had bought together without her knowledge.

"My husband and I owned a modest home which we had bought from the city council. But one frosty morning, my six children and I woke up to loud bangs by rowdy youth who had been hired to evict us from the house.