Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Khan Younis, Gaza – The face of 37-year-old Samar Ahmed shows clear signs of exhaustion.
It is not just because she has five children, nor that they have been displaced several times since the start of Israel's brutal war on Gaza 14 months ago and now live in cramped, cold conditions in a makeshift tent in Khan Younis' al-Mawasi area. Samar is also a victim of domestic violence and has no way to escape from her abuser in the cramped conditions of this camp.
Two days ago, her husband punched her in the face, leaving her with a swollen cheek and blood in her eye. Her older daughter clung to her all night after the attack, which happened in front of the children.
Samar doesn't want to break up his family – they've already been forced to move from Gaza City, to the Shatti camp in Rafah and now to Khan Younis – and the children are young. Her eldest, Layla, is just 15. She also has Zayn, 12, Dana, 10, Lana, seven, and Addy, five, to think about.
On the day Al Jazeera visited, she was trying to keep her two younger girls busy with school work. Sitting together in the small tent that is made of rags, the three of them have scattered several notebooks around them. Little Dana is snuggled up close to her mother, as if she wants to support her. Her younger sister is crying from hunger and Samar doesn't seem to know how to help them both.
As a displaced family, the loss of privacy added a whole new layer of pressure.
“I lost my personal space as a woman and a wife in this place. I don't want to say that my life was perfect before the war, but I was able to express what was in me in conversation with my husband. I could scream without anyone hearing me,” says Samar. “I can control my children more in my home. Here I am living on the street and the cover of concealment has been lifted from my life.”
A loud argument between husband and wife drifts from the neighboring tent. Samar's face turns red with shame and sadness as foul language fills the air. She doesn't want her children to hear this.
Her instinct is to tell the kids to go out and play, but Laila is washing dishes in a small bowl of water and an argument next door brings her own problems back into focus.
“Every day I suffer from anxiety because of the disagreements with my husband. Two days ago it was a big shock to me that he hit me like that in front of my children. All our neighbors heard my screams and cries and came to calm the situation between us.
“I felt broken,” Samar says, worried that the neighbors will think it's her fault—that her husband yells at her so much because she's a bad wife.
“Sometimes when he shouts and curses, I keep quiet so that people around me think he is shouting at someone else. I'm trying to keep my dignity a little bit,” she says.
Samar tries to ward off her husband's anger by trying to solve the problems facing the family on her own. She visits the aid workers every day to ask for food. She believes the pressures of war made her husband this way.
Before the war, he worked in a small carpentry workshop with a friend, and that kept him busy. There were fewer arguments.
Now she says: “Because of the seriousness of the differences between me and my husband, I wanted a divorce. But I hesitated for the sake of my children.”
Samar goes to counseling sessions with other women to try to release some of the negative energy and anxiety building up inside her. It helps her to hear that she is not alone. “I hear a lot of women's stories and try to take comfort in what I'm going through through their experiences.”
As he speaks, Samar gets up to start preparing food. She worries when her husband will return and if there will be enough food. A plate of beans with cold bread is all she can cook right now. She can't light the fire because there is no gas.
Suddenly, Samar falls silent, fearing that the voice outside belongs to her husband. It doesn't work.
She asks her daughters to sit down and look at their math homework. She whispers, “He came out yelling at Adi. I hope he is in a good mood.”
“War Did This to Us”
Later, Samar's husband, Karim Badwan, 42, sits next to his daughters, crammed into the small tent where they live.
He is desperate. “This is not life. I can't understand what I'm living. I'm trying to adapt to these difficult circumstances, but I can't. I went from being practical and professional to someone who gets angry all the time.
Karim says he is deeply ashamed that he has hit his wife several times since the start of the war.
“I hope the war ends before my wife's energy runs out and she leaves me,” he says. “My wife is a good woman, so she tolerates what I say.”
A tear rolls down Samar's bruised face as he listens.
Karim says he knows what he is doing is wrong. Before the war, he never dreamed that he would be able to harm her.
“I had friends who beat their wives. I was like, “How do you sleep at night?” Unfortunately, I do now.
“I did it more than once, but the hardest was when I left a scar on her face and eye. I admit that this is a huge failure of self-control,” Karim says, his voice shaking.
“The pressure of war is great. I left my home, my job and my future and I sit here in a tent, helpless in front of my children. I can't get a job and when I leave the tent I feel like if I talk to someone I'll lose my temper.”
Karim knows that his wife and children have endured a lot. “I apologize to them for my behavior, but I continue to do it. Maybe I need medication, but my wife doesn't deserve all this from me. I try to stop so she doesn't have to leave me.
Samar's despair is compounded by the loss of her own family, which she leaves in the north to escape the bombing there with her husband and his family. Now she is desperately lonely.
Her biggest fear is that she will burn out completely and become unable to care for her family, as she worries her husband has already done.
The responsibility of finding water and food, caring for the children and thinking about their future took its toll and she lives in a constant state of fear.
“I'm trying to be strong for my mom”
As the oldest child, Laila develops severe anxiety from the fights between her father and mother and fears for her mother.
She says, “My father and mother fight every day. My mother suffers from a strange nervous condition. Sometimes she yells at me for no reason. I try to bear it and understand her condition so that I don't lose her. I don't like to see her in this state, but the war has done all this to us.”
Laila still sees Karim as a good father and blames the world for allowing this brutal war to go on for so long. “My father yells at me a lot. Sometimes he hits my sisters. My mother cries all night and wakes up with swollen eyes from the sadness of what we live.”
She sits in her bed for long hours thinking about their life before the war and her plans to learn English.
“I'm trying to be strong for my mom.”
“Unimaginable Conditions”
The family is not alone. Gaza has seen a significant increase in domestic violence, with many women attending psychological support sessions offered by aid workers in clinics.
Holud Abu Hajir, a psychologist, has met many victims since the start of the war in clinics in the displaced persons camps. However, she fears that there are many more people who are ashamed to talk about it.
“There's a lot of secrecy and fear among women to talk about it,” she says. “I have received many cases of abuse outside of the group sessions – women who want to talk about what they are suffering and ask for help.”
Living in a state of constant instability and insecurity, enduring repeated displacement and being forced to live in tents packed very tightly together deprived the women of privacy, leaving them with nowhere to turn.
“There is no comprehensive system of psychological treatment,” Abu Hajir told Al Jazeera. “We only work in emergency situations. The cases we deal with do require several sessions and some of them are difficult cases where women need protection.
“There are very serious cases of abuse that have escalated to sexual abuse, and that is a dangerous thing.
Divorces have increased, many between spouses who have been separated by Israel's armed corridor between the north and the south.
The war took a terrible toll, especially on women and children, says Abu Hajir.
Nevin al-Barbari, a 35-year-old psychologist, says it is impossible to give children in Gaza the support they need in these conditions.
“Unfortunately, what children go through during war cannot be described. They need very long psychological support sessions. Hundreds of thousands of children have lost their homes, lost a family member, and many have lost their entire family.
Being forced to live in difficult – and sometimes violent – family circumstances has made life immeasurably worse for many.
“There is very clear and widespread family violence among the displaced in particular… The psychological and behavioral state of children is very negatively affected. Some children have become very aggressive and severely hit other children.
Al Barbari recently came across a case of a 10-year-old child who hit another with a stick, causing severe injuries and bleeding.
“When I met this child, he would not stop crying,” she says. “He thought I was going to punish him. When I asked him about his family, he told me that his mother and father fight every day and his mother goes to her family's tent for days.
“He said he misses his home, his room and the way his family used to be. This child is a very common example of thousands of children.
The road to recovery for these children will be long, says Al Barbari. “There are no schools to take them. Children are forced to bear great responsibilities, fill water and wait in long queues for food aid. There are no places for them to rest.
“There are so many stories that we don't know that these kids live every day.”
