MENAFem Movement I Safi: When a City Becomes a Site of Structural Violence Against Life

At MENAFem Movement, we are following with deep concern the events that unfolded in the city of Safi on the evening of Sunday, 14 December 2025, when floods claimed the lives of more than 37 people, including women, leaving behind a new collective wound in a city already exhausted by exclusion, pollution, and accumulated inequalities.

What happened in Safi is a stark manifestation of long-standing structural violence, exercised through development policies that accumulate risks at the expense of people and treat marginalized cities as expendable spaces. When predictable seasonal rainfall turns into a lethal force, the real question is not about the rain itself, but about the absence of protection and the lack of investment in life.

While public resources are poured into large-scale, spectacle-driven projects tied to the state’s image and symbolic standing, entire neighborhoods are left without effective sanitation networks, without preventive infrastructure, and without a real right to safety. This imbalance is, in reality, the result of political choices that reorder priorities away from people’s needs, particularly those of groups who already bear the burden of care work and invisible labor.

From our position at MENAFem Movement, we assert that what occurred in Safi cannot be separated from an economic model financed through debt, governed by profit logic, and whose costs are transferred onto bodies, homes, and the daily labor of women. Public debt, presented as a development solution, in practice becomes a tool for perpetuating dependency, shrinking social spending, and legitimizing the neglect of life-protecting infrastructure.

Safi is a city that generates wealth without protecting its residents. It hosts heavy and polluting industries, from phosphates to energy and cement, yet offers its population little beyond a contaminated environment and compounded health and social precarity. This contradiction lies at the heart of environmental injustice: benefits are concentrated, while harms are distributed among those with no voice in decision-making.

We also emphasize that disasters do not occur in a social vacuum. The floods did not claim lives randomly; they exposed existing social inequalities. Women were among the direct victims of this catastrophe, while also carrying the heaviest burdens in moments of collapse: rescuing children, securing food, caring for the injured, and reorganizing life within destroyed or threatened homes. This vital labor, which makes the continuation of life possible amid devastation, remains unrecognized and invisible in public policy, as if care were an inexhaustible resource that can be drained without protection or support.

Based on this understanding, MENAFem Movement affirms the following:

• We consider what happened in Safi a direct result of development policies that marginalize the right to a safe life and prioritize image and investment over protection and care.
• We call for genuine accountability regarding the political and institutional responsibilities that allowed such risks to accumulate.
• We call for a radical rethinking of the meaning of development, grounded in environmental justice, a care-centered economy, and the right of residents to a city that protects them rather than kills them.
• We affirm our full solidarity with the people of Safi, and with all cities and regions that have been turned into sacrifice zones in the name of growth.
• Ultimately, we believe that justice does not begin after disaster strikes, but before it, through how resources are distributed, whose lives are protected, and who is left exposed. Unless the right to safety and care becomes central to economic decision-making, Safi will be repeated under different names, in other cities.