In Gaza, a war also against women

Photo: May Farrag Le Devoir Rim Qahwagi and Om Ghassam of the Palestinian Women’s Union (GUWP)

Mathieu Carbasse Cairo

Published at 0:00

• Middle East

Samira Satoum wears a flowery tunic from which a pendant showing the outlines of Palestine escapes. This neat outfit is the only one that the professor of Arabic literature at the University of Gaza took with her on the roads of exile, in the first weeks of the conflict.

“We had for the most part only the outfit we were wearing when we left. I couldn’t take my jewelry, my personal belongings. I only had food in my luggage,” says the 57-year-old woman.

The disabled brother she looks after also slowed down their travels. So, Samira traveled light.

Light, but with a heavy heart, because of the illness that is eating away at her. Because if Samira finally managed to reach Egypt, where Le Devoir met her, it is because she suffers from breast cancer and she was authorized to come to Cairo for treatment, before Israel closed the Rafah crossing point last May.

Photo: May Farrag Le Devoir On the left, Samira Satoum proudly wears a pendant with the outline of Palestine. On the right, Om Ghassam, who accompanied her son who was seriously injured in the shoulder to Egypt.

In the camps, dangerous conditions

Like Samira, nearly a million women and girls have had to abandon their homes since the start of the war and only a handful have been able to take refuge in Egypt. The majority of them now live in refugee camps. Others have not been so “lucky”. Since October 7, 2023, more than half of the 43,000 Gazan victims have been women and children.

According to the United Nations report titled Gaza: A War on Women’s Health, the number of deaths of women is even disproportionately underestimated compared to that of men, and women are more often faced with medical problems requiring an immediate response than men. Nearly 180,000 of them are currently facing potentially fatal health risks.

Photo: May Farrag Le Devoir On the left, Najwa Iqtifiam, from the Palestinian Women’s Union (GUWP) in Cairo. On the right, Rose El-Masri, for whom the lack of privacy was the hardest thing about living in the camps.

“Women and children are the ones who suffer the most from the war,” says Amal Al-Agha, who chairs the Egyptian branch of the Palestinian Women’s Union, an organization linked to the Palestine Liberation Organization that helps displaced Palestinian families in Egypt.

“In the camps, there is a lack of water and food, but also of natural gas, which forces women to cook with pieces of wood that they collect around the camps. This causes injuries to the hands and generates smoke that is harmful to the lungs,” she explains in the offices of her organization, where Le Devoir met her in Cairo.

In the 50 m2 tents, as big as small Montreal three-and-a-halfs, in which sometimes more than 30 people are crammed, women and girls are more exposed to communicable diseases because of their disproportionate role in caring for the sick. Women represent more than two-thirds of cases of gastrointestinal diseases and hepatitis A. According to the United Nations Population Fund, of the 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women, 15,000 are on the verge of starvation and one in three children under the age of 2 suffers from malnutrition.

As for the 5,000 women who give birth every month in Gaza, they have to make do with the few beds available in hospitals and sometimes give birth in a tent or even in the street.

In the cramped conditions of the tents, Samira often fell asleep with her hijab on, so that she would be ready to leave at any moment in the event of a bombing. But also to avoid the lice and diseases that proliferate. Like many women, she suffered from scalp problems due to the lack of hygiene. She even says she saw women forced to shave their heads, like children, to get rid of lice.

Because of the disease, her skin itches terribly. She has to pour water on her body to relieve it. In the camps in the Gaza Strip where she remained a refugee for several months, she would wait for nightfall, when everyone was asleep, to find some water and thus give herself a little respite.

And then, due to the lack of available menstrual products, she would use, like other women, old clothes during her periods, sometimes toilet paper, even if it was expensive. Because everything has been expensive in Gaza since October 7, 2023: the price of a simple bar of soap has increased tenfold and now costs around 20 shekels, or more than CA$7.

Couples are breaking up

In the camps, the lives of couples are also put to the test.

Activist and board member of the Palestinian Women’s Union, Hoda Elayyan has collected many testimonies from couples who are tottering.

Photo: May Farrag Le Devoir Hoda Elayyan, a member of the Palestinian Women’s Union (GUWP) in Cairo, lost 50 members of her family in a single Israeli strike.

“With drones constantly flying in the sky, explosions, death all around and promiscuity in tents, we are seeing an explosion of separations due to major stressful situations in couples. There have never been so many,” she says in an interview with Devoir. Due to the lack of privacy, arguments are multiplying and it is not even possible to reconcile in bed.

Above all, separation means a new blow for women in Gaza, because they must then also separate from their children.

“In Palestinian tradition, children are automatically entrusted to the father. So women have to find a place with their family or with people they know in another part of the camp, or sometimes even in another camp,” says Ms. Elayyan, dressed all in black in her traditional dress.

Separated from her children

Their children are often all that remains for women in Gaza who have been torn from their homes, the center of their existence. Moreover, when asked what their greatest suffering is, the Palestinian women that Le Devoir met in Egypt all have the same answer: seeing their children far from school.

“The mere fact that children have been deprived of school for a year now affects them considerably. They cannot bear to see their children without a daily routine and deprived of points of reference,” explains Amal Al-Agha.

Moreover, according to her, children who have experienced war are “not doing well at all,” both physically (injuries, illnesses, lack of hygiene) and psychologically.

“And when family members are injured, it is still the women who accompany them to Egypt for treatment. This is an additional burden on the shoulders of Palestinian women,” laments Ms. Al-Agha.

Having to leave her family behind to accompany her husband to Egypt is exactly what happened to Rim Kahwagi.

This 46-year-old mother had to flee in a hurry from a school where she had sought refuge with her six children. She remembers this race against death amidst bullets and bombs.

“We had to run looking only ahead. If you stopped or looked to the side, they would kill you. I was looking ahead, shouting the names of each of my children over and over again to make sure everyone was following.”

Photo: May Farrag Le Devoir Rim Qahwagi dreams every day of seeing her children again, whom she left behind in Gaza.

Rim Qahwagi and her children will ultimately survive and will manage to find shelter in a camp in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip. It is there that her husband will suffer a serious heart attack requiring his emergency evacuation to Egypt. Rim will accompany him before Israel decides to permanently close the border, leaving the mother separated from her six children, whom she entrusted to members of her family before leaving. Every day now, she dreams of seeing them again.

Staying strong is therefore the leitmotif of the women of Gaza. “As a mother, you have no choice,” sighs Rim Kahwagi, who is now only waiting for a ceasefire so she can go and be reunited with her children.

“You don’t have time to be sad, to mourn those who have died. Mourning and sadness are postponed until tomorrow [after the war, editor’s note].”

When Samira Satoum is asked what the main qualities of Palestinian women are and how they manage to get through it all, she thinks, and then it all comes out at once: “persistence, generosity, patience, resilience, strength and a sense of belonging.”

At home in Gaza, she had spent her life building a library containing books by all the authors she loved. Today, her 10,000 or so books have been reduced to ashes, but Samira readily quotes a few lines from Mahmoud Darwich, a Palestinian man of letters: “My country is not a suitcase, and I am not a traveler. I do not hate people, I do not harm anyone. Beware of my hunger and my rage.”

This report was funded with support from the Transat International Journalism Fund-Le Devoir.