In one of the forgotten camps, where the easy becomes difficult and the difficult becomes impossible, Fadwa lives, having lost everything.
With the intensification and expansion of the October 7th 2023 Israeli aggression, she was forced to flee her home to the south. On the way there, the Israeli army arrested her husband, while she remained with her children, moving from tent to tent for nearly a year. Her husband was eventually released from captivity, but Fadwa’s suffering did not end there, as she had thought. Instead, a new chapter began, as her husband was transformed into a different person due to the torture he had endured in Israeli prisons. “He was traumatized by the torment he had suffered. He turned into a different person, not him! He started cursing, swearing, insulting, couldn’t take a word from anyone, and if he found something in front of him, he would break it over my head.” And so, her joy at his return alive soon turned to shock, fear, and pain.
“He puts a knife to my throat and wounds me, he bites me, and he beats me with a hose. Once he threw a large stone at me; if it had hit me, it would have killed me on the spot. My body would turn blue and swell up,” Fadwa describes her husband’s actions, without going into further details. Looking at her young daughter, she continues to recount with sorrow the situation she and her children have endured. “Once he beat me, strangled me, and then grabbed a knife and came at me, trying to stab me in the stomach. I hid in the bathroom, and my daughter started crying and saying, ‘Mama is dead.’”
When hunger becomes the cause of daily conflict, there is no ground left for dialogue or understanding. Food is a right for Fadwa and her children, but it seems like an impossible task for her husband. “Our problems have been all about food. We have nothing to eat, and my children are crying and dying of hunger in front of me. We go for days with no bread and survive only on lentil soup, but even lentils are no longer available.” She continues, “It’s not that I ask him for a lot of food, but there’s nothing!”
Her husband’s reaction to her basic and rightful demand for food is getting violent, beating, and insulting her. “He raises his voice and insults my family. He tells me, ‘Your father is a spy, and your mother is a whore, you have no family, you are dirty, you are a slut, you are a whore. He says everything he can think of,” as he tries to embarrass her in front of everyone. Life in the camps does not muffle a sound, not even a whisper, which puts Fadwa in a constant defensive position to deny her husband’s accusations. “When people hear him, they believe him and come to ask me if my family is really like that. He raises his voice on purpose so that people will hear him, and I don’t ask him for anything. He wants me to be mute, deaf, and blind.”
Fadwa realizes that her husband was not always this cruel, but the combination of Israeli aggression, imprisonment, poverty, and life in tents turned him into a ticking time bomb. “He was short-tempered before, but with little money, his illness, his inability to provide food for his children, in addition to living in a tent, no one could bear this much.” On the other hand, she was left with no means of support, especially after she returned from the south of the Gaza Strip to the north during the short-lived truce, hoping to find her home and possessions, only to discover that the aggression had robbed her of them. “If I had anything to sell, I would have sold it and bought food, but I have nothing. My house is gone, it was stolen and then bombed.”
The ongoing displacement and the shock of losing her home, forced Fadwa throughout the aggression—and until this testimony was ocumented—to live in a dilapidated tent. Her greatest ambition became to have a better tent that could be called a shelter. “From the moment we were displaced, we have been living in tents,” she says. The tent we’re in has broken wood. I hope to get a better tent than this one.” She adds, “None of us can bear living in tents, but what can we do?”
Fadwa struggles with the simplest details of daily life in the camp, as do her children, who should be sitting in school or playing, but reality forces them to take on tasks beyond their young age. As Fadwa says, for example, “My husband is sick and depends on our young daughters. They are the ones who fetch water and bring food. Their spirits are broken and they don’t interact with anyone, they just fetch food and work, only to be beaten up by their father.”
Despite everything she has been through, Fadwa renews her plea and her hope: “If only reconstruction could begin, if only women were included and supported in the plans—it would make such a difference.” She dreams of the rebuilding and restoring of the city she once knew, believing that it will ease her suffering greatly and alleviate the hellish conditions she, her husband, and her children endure in the tent, which has affected all aspects of their lives. For Fadwa, the tent was where their suffering was exacerbated, and reconstruction and leaving the tent behind is the only way her nightmare can end.
Disclaimer: The names used in the previous testimony are aliases.
“This document has been produced with the support of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and therefore do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.”
