By Xinhua
Gaza : Um Yehia Dardouna, 34, of Jabalia town in northern Gaza Strip, divides her time between Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, where her son Yehia lays, and her house which is close to the border between Israel and northeast Gaza Strip.
Um Yehia said she doesn’t care about the International Women’s Day which falls on Saturday, adding that her only concern is Yehia, her nine-year-old boy who survived an Israeli airstrike near herhouse on Feb. 28.
He was playing football when the attack happened, and four of his friends were killed in the strike. Doctors at Shifa Hospital said that Yehia suffers from severe shrapnel hits, with breakages and burns in his legs and wounds in his abdomen.
Her thoughts are also divided between tears and prayers, next to her son’s bed at Shifa hospital, and fears and worries about the five other children who are left at home in the tense border area.
“The Israeli occupation deepened the suffering of Palestinian women and kidnapped the rights of children. They don’t give a damn if it is March 8 or 9; everyday is the same,” Um Yehia said as she patted at her son’s head.
In the same room, Um Ali Faraj, a neighbor of Um Yehia, was sitting beside the bed of her son who was wounded in the same strike. But Um Ali left three of her children at their grandfather’s house and brought the youngest three along to the hospital.
“I dare not leave them alone at the house because the danger of death is always renewed by the missiles, projectiles and the tank incursions,” she said.
Hedaya Shamoun, a women’s rights activist, said the agendas to mark the Women’s Day in Gaza have been interrupted because of last week’s Israeli invasion in southeast Gaza Strip and the airstrikes, which killed more than 125 Palestinians.
“Activities to mark this occasion are fading year by year,” Shamoun lamented. “The killing of seven women in the latest army operation paints a grim picture on the occasion.”
For Jamila al-Shanti, a Hamas lawmaker, Palestinian women “pay higher price for the Israeli occupation’s crimes as a wife, a mother, a sister and a mother of martyr.”
“The Palestinian woman is a woman of resistance as she looks after the house when the husband or the sons are away for Jihad,” Mrs. al-Shanti said as she toured houses demolished by the Israeli army in the east of Jabaliya refugee camp.
“The whole world has turned away from the Palestinian children and women,” Mrs. al-Shanti deplored.
In Gaza and the West Bank city of Ramallah, hundreds of Palestinian women demonstrated to mark the International Woman’s Day. In Gaza, women demonstrated before the headquarters of the United Nations office in the city.
The Gazan women called for ending the Israeli siege imposed for almost nine months since the Hamas takeover last June in the enclave, where crossings had been closed and life among the population deteriorated to the worst ever, according to international human rights organizations.