‘I’m broken’: The women enduring domestic violence amid Israeli war on Gaza

Khan Younis, Gaza – The face of Samar Ahmed, 37, 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 are now living in cramped, cold conditions in a makeshift tent in the al-Mawasi area of Khan Younis. Samar is also a victim of domestic violence and has no way to escape her abuser in the cramped conditions of this camp.

Two days ago, her husband beat her around the face leaving her with a swollen cheek and a blood spot in her eye. Her eldest daughter clung to her all night following that attack, which happened in front of the children.

Samar does not want to break up her family – they have already been forced to move from Gaza City, to the Shati camp in Rafah and now to Khan Younis – and the children are young. Her eldest, Laila, is just 15. She also has 12-year-old Zain, 10-year-old Dana, Lana, seven, and Adi, five, to think about.

On the day that Al Jazeera visits her, she is trying to keep her two younger girls occupied with schoolwork. Sitting together in the small tent, which is made from rags, the three have spread out some notebooks around them. Little Dana is huddled up close to her mother, seemingly wanting to give her support. Her younger sister is crying from hunger and Samar seems at a loss as to how to help them both.

As a displaced family, the loss of privacy has added a whole new layer of pressure.

“I lost my privacy 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 inside me in conversation with my husband. I could scream without anyone hearing me,” Samar says. “I could control my children more in my home. Here, I live in the street and the cover of concealment has been removed from my life.”

A loud argument between a husband and wife drifts through from the tent next door. Samar’s face turns red with embarrassment and sadness as bad language fills the air. She does not want her children to hear this.

Her instinct is to tell the children to go out and play, but Laila is washing dishes in a small bowl of water and the argument next door brings her own problems back into sharp focus.

“Every day, I suffer from anxiety because of the disagreements with my husband. Two days ago, it was a great shock for me that he hit me in this way in front of my children. All our neighbours heard my screams and crying and came to calm the situation between us.

“I felt broken,” Samar says, worried the neighbours will think she is to blame – that her husband shouts so much because she is a bad wife.

“Sometimes, when he screams and curses, I stay quiet so that those around us think he’s screaming at someone else. I try to preserve my dignity a little,” she says.

Samar tries to preempt her husband’s anger by attempting to solve the problems facing the family herself. She visits the aid workers every day to ask for food. She believes it is the pressures of the war that have made her husband this way.

Before the war, he worked in a small carpentry shop with a friend and this kept him busy. There were fewer arguments.

Now, she says: “Because of the severity of the disagreements between me and my husband, I wanted a divorce. But I hesitated for the sake of my children.”

Samar goes to psychological support sessions with other women, to try to release some of the negative energy and anxiety building inside her. It helps her to hear that she is not alone. “I hear the stories of many women and I try to console myself with what I am going through, through their experiences.”

As she talks, Samar gets up to start preparing food. She is fretting about when her husband will return and whether there will be enough to eat. A plate of beans with cold bread is all she can rustle up right now. She cannot light the fire because there is no gas.

Suddenly, Samar goes silent, fearful that a voice outside belongs to her husband. It does not.

She asks her daughters to sit down and look at their maths problems. She whispers: “He went out shouting at Adi. I hope he is in a good mood.”

‘The war did this to us’

Later on, Samar’s husband, Karim Badwan, 42, sits beside his daughters, crammed inside the small tent they are living in.

He is despairing. “This is not a life. I can’t comprehend what I’m living. I’m trying to adapt to these difficult circumstances, but I cannot. I’ve turned from a practical and professional man into a man who gets so angry all the time.”

Karim says he is deeply ashamed that he has hit his wife on several occasions since the war began.

“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 she listens.

Karim says he knows what he is doing is wrong. Before the war, he never dreamed he would be capable of harming her.

“I had friends who used to beat their wives. I used to say: ‘How does he sleep at night?’ Unfortunately, now I do it.

“I did it more than once, but the hardest time was when I left a mark on her face and eye. I admit that this is a huge failure in terms of self-control,” Karim says, his voice trembling.

“The pressures of war are great. I left my home, my work and my future and I am sitting here in a tent, helpless in front of my children. I can’t find a job and when I leave the tent, I feel that if I talk to anyone I will lose my temper.”

Karim knows his wife and children have endured a great deal. “I apologise to them for my behaviour, but I keep doing it. Maybe I need medication, but my wife does not deserve all this from me. I am trying to stop so that she doesn’t have to leave me.”

Samar’s despair is compounded by the loss of her own family who she left in the north to flee the bombing there with her husband and his family. Now, she is desperately lonely.

Her greatest fear is that she will completely burn out and become unable to care for her family, as she worries her husband already has.

The responsibility for finding water and food, caring for the children, and thinking about their future, has all taken its toll and she lives in a constant state of fear.

‘Trying to be strong for my mother’

As the eldest child, Laila is developing severe anxiety from the fighting between her father and mother and she fears for her mother.

She says: “My father and mother quarrel every day. My mother suffers from a strange nervous state. Sometimes she shouts at me for no reason. I try to bear it and understand her condition so that I don’t lose her. I do not like seeing her in this state, but the war did all of 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 shouts at me a lot. Sometimes he hits my sisters. My mother cries all night and wakes up with swollen eyes from sadness over what we are living.”

She sits in her bed for long hours thinking about their lives before the war and her plans to study English.

“I try to be strong for my mother.”

‘Unimaginable conditions’

The family is not alone. In Gaza, there has been a marked rise in domestic violence with many women attending psychological support sessions offered by aid workers in clinics.

Kholoud Abu Hajir, a psychologist, has met many victims since the start of the war at clinics in the displacement camps. However, she fears there are far more who are too ashamed to talk about it.

“There is a great secrecy and fear among the women about talking about it,” she says. “I have received many cases of violence away from group sessions – women who want to talk about what they are suffering and ask for help.”

Living in a constant state of instability and insecurity, enduring repeated displacement and being forced to live in tents crowded very closely together have deprived women of privacy, leaving them with nowhere to turn.

“There is no comprehensive psychological treatment system,” Abu Hajir tells Al Jazeera. “We only work in emergency situations. The cases we deal with really require multiple sessions, and some of them are difficult cases where women need protection.

“There are very severe cases of violence that have reached sexual assault, and this is a dangerous thing.”

The number of divorces has risen – many between spouses who have been separated by the Israeli armed corridor between the north and the south.

The war has taken a terrible toll on women and children, particularly, Abu Hajir says.

Nevin al-Barbari, 35, a psychologist, says it is impossible to give children in Gaza the support they need in these conditions.

“Unfortunately, what children are experiencing during the 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 of them 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 … Children’s psychological and behavioural states have been affected very negatively. Some children have become very violent and hit other children violently.”

Recently, al-Barbari came across the case of a 10-year-old child who had hit another with a stick, causing severe injury and bleeding.

“When I met this child, he kept crying,” she says. “He thought that I would punish him. When I asked him about his family, he told me that his mother and father have a big fight every day and his mother goes to her family’s tent for days.

“He said he missed his home, his room and the way his family used to be. This child is a very common example of thousands of children.”

It will be a long road to recovery for these children, al-Barbari says. “There are no schools to occupy them. Children are forced to bear great responsibilities, filling water and waiting in long lines for food aid. There are no recreational areas for them.

“There are so many stories that we do not know about, that these children are living every day.”