Gazans speak of severe hardship after war
Two Gazans, a housewife and university student, tell of their daily struggles to pick up the pieces after the last war shattered their lives.
A narrow hallway leading to the entrance of Umm Mohammed’s crumbling home in the Shaaf neighborhood east of Gaza City has become her only abode. Israeli warplanes destroyed her two-story house during Operation Protective Edge, rendering it uninhabitable. The family no longer has shelter.
Mohammed spends most of her time in the hallway, where she washes the family's clothes, cleans the dishes and receives visitors. However, she can't sleep there because it is directly adjacent to a busy street, and so she sleeps in the library of the mosque opposite her house, which was also bombed.
“I'm a woman, and can't sleep in the street like men. Once the daily evening prayers are over [around 8 p.m.], I head to the library of the mosque to sleep, and I wake up before the dawn prayers [around 5 a.m.] to start a new day,” Mohammed told Al-Monitor.
Her day starts by preparing breakfast for her unemployed husband and four children, and then she washes the family's clothes by hand. By the afternoon, she starts collecting firewood from the trees destroyed by Israeli tanks to cook lunch for her family.
