GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — On March 17, Jordanian authorities arrested Rola al-Amin, a Jordanian-Palestinian Al Jazeera English reporter, after she claimed custody of her 5-year-old daughter. Her arrest attracted media attention and generated solidarity among Palestinian women, who took to social media platforms not because Amin's detention was unprecedented or simply because they too are women and mothers, but because her arrest reflects the reality of Palestinian women whose cries demanding custody of their children are ignored.
Sahar (a pseudonym) and her husband fought constantly in their home east of Gaza City, so he divorced her. According to the law, a husband can divorce his wife simply by verbally expressing his wish to do so, and it does not matter whether he does it in his wife's presence or in her absence. The couple then heads to the Sharia court, where jurists try to reconcile the two parties. If that fails, the divorce becomes final and is recorded with the legal system.
After Sahar's divorce, she constructed a shelter from cloth and old wood near the rubble of her concrete home, which had been bombed at the time of the ground invasion during the war with Israel last summer. She lives in this small room with her seven children as she tries to keep custody of them. Meanwhile, Sahar's ex-husband and father of her children built a tin house, a few meters from Sahar’s makeshift home. He lives there with his new wife, who had lived in their home before the bombing. Sahar’s current problem is that she is afraid to claim her divorce papers from the court for fear of losing her children to her husband, who had left her years before the divorce, forcing her to raise them alone.
“My husband refuses to register the divorce in court, so he wouldn’t have to take care of the children or pay alimony, since he would be immediately granted custody by virtue of the law,” Sahar told Al-Monitor. “He does not want custody because he does not want to spend money on the children. However, at the same time, he threatens to take my children if I ever resort to the court and claim legal custody, because he knows once I get it, I would ask for alimony, which he refuses to do under the pretext of going through difficult economic problems.” To take care of her children and cover financial costs, Sahar has had to take several jobs at civil associations.
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