GAZA CITY, The Gaza Strip — Rula and her husband had started to frequently fight. They clashed over small things, like how she talked back to him, and big differences, like how to raise their children in the Gaza Strip, a small and war-torn coastal enclave controlled by the militant Hamas and with borders blocked by Israel and Egypt.
So after 20 years together, Rula’s (whose last name is being withheld for privacy reasons) husband divorced her two years ago — reflecting a rise in divorce rates among Gaza’s 1.9 million residents.
It used to be rare for a couple, especially one married for so long, to divorce in conservative Gaza, where even social relations between males and females before marriage face restrictions. Divorce is now a topic of frequent public concern, and one seen as an indicator of how bad Gaza’s humanitarian and sociopolitical crises have become.
Divorce is a “national catastrophe,” says Abu Salman Al Mughany, 75, a “mukhtar,” or community leader, who mitigates family issues in Gaza City. “It’s the collapse of the social fabric in our communities.”
U.S. President Donald Trump is currently on his first trip abroad, having first traveled to Saudi Arabia on a regional trip that also will take him to Israel and the Palestinian Territories. But while Trump is visiting the Palestinian city of Bethlehem in the West Bank, he won’t get a chance to witness the stresses feeding divorce in Gaza. Couples face staggeringly high unemployment and poverty; widespread depression and psychological malaise from living under blockade and conflict; and familial pressures for young people to marry amid bleak future prospects.
“They [young people in Gaza] have no future,” Al Mughany says. “No life with dignity… There are no jobs, no hope, no freedom. There is no chance to get out.”
The United Nations has warned that by 2020 the Gaza Strip could be uninhabitable due to widespread destruction wrought by the 2014 Hamas war with Israel, the third in a decade. The resulting economic and health crises, including a lack of safe drinking water and medicines. (The U.N. says more than 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, died in the 2014 war, along with 67 Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel.)
Previous peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have aimed at creating a Palestinian state. But with negotiations at a standstill, Israel has kept the Hamas-controlled territory blockaded on security grounds, while Hamas and the Fatah-party dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank remain bitterly divided. Now Gaza’s electrical and sewage systems have failed and unemployment is among the highest in the world.
In the backdrop, the number of divorces is rising. According to the most recent figures released in February by the Supreme Sharia Judicial Council in Gaza, the number of divorces in 2016 was 3,188, a 17.6 percent increase from 2015.
“It’s rising in an unnatural way,” says Sameh, 26, who has been divorced three times since 2009 and requested only her first name be used for privacy reasons. “I used to be surprised and think these things are catastrophe. Now I feel like it’s a normal thing.”
For women, however, the divorce trend is particularly precarious: Under Hamas’ form of religious law, only a man can file for divorce, says Amal Siyam, director of the Women’s Affairs Center in Gaza City. (A woman, under very specific cases, can apply for a marital separation.) In practice that means women are left without a say about divorce. Gaza law also favors fathers for custody of children. Some women will try to stay in abusive marriages to remain with their children.
Siyam says many young couples cannot afford their own space because of insufficient available housing and job prospects curtailed by the blockade. Young couples consequently live with the husbands’ families in close quarters. Factor in long hours at home because of unemployment at home increasing familial tensions and marital conflict.
“The husband wants an independent and dignified life after marriage,” says Al Mughany. “Instead he relies on his parents or falls deeper into poverty.”
Impoverished families feel pressured to marry their daughters at a young age, even if the match isn’t right, Siyam says. While there are no hard figures, Palestinians report that abuse of drugs, such as the opioid Tramadol, is also rising, fueling financial and relational strife.
A further factor is the recent rise of marriage facilitators, private companies that offer men cheap deals for wedding ceremonies to be repaid with interest, Siyam says. Facing few future job prospects, already impoverished men are going into debt to marry. Unable to provide for their wives, arguments fight and separate ensue.
For divorced women, abuse all too frequently defined their marriages. Several women, who requested to remain anonymous for their security, described in interviews enduring recurring physical spousal abuse. Still, when their husbands divorced them they faced new threats: that of shame on their families and separation from their children due to the custody law. Divorced women traditionally return to their families and receive a small compensation from the government and, in theory, the last third of their dowry.
Rula is one of those divorcees in Gaza who hasn’t heard the word “mama” in a long time. Her former husband, a cousin who is well connected in the Hamas-controlled government, has full custody of her three sons. She’s supposed to be able to see them weekly, but they don’t want to because he’s told them she’s a bad women, a “kufr” [infidel], she says. He remarried a week later.
Divorced women in Gaza are considered a burden, says Rula, who is 40.
Still, she peppers her pained but persistent speech with frequent, “Thanks to my God,” and holds out hope that her sons will come. Unlike nearly all other single women in Gaza, Rula has her own small apartment in Gaza City. She doesn’t own much, but she has two small beds with frames shaped like cars for her sons to sleep in, one day.
With a hint of dark humor, Rula says she’s lucky that her home is in a secure place: She’s very close to Gaza’s main Shifa hospital, meaning she’s less likely to be bombed by Israel. The building’s owner is a Fatah member and the prayer leader of the local Mosque from Hamas, so there’s protection from both feuding sides.
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Conflict Feeds Rising Divorce Rates Across Gaza originally appeared on usnews.com
