Ask Huda Naeem how she intends to use her influence as a newly elected MP for Hamas and she ticks off a list of wrongs done to women in the name of religion.
Forced marriage, honor killings, low pay and girls being kept out of school are her priorities for change in the Palestinian parliament. That is when she is not preparing her 13-year-old son to die in the fight against Israel.
"A lot of things need to change," she said.
"Women in Gaza and the West Bank should be given complete rights. Some women and girls are made to marry someone they don't want to marry. This is not in our religion, it's our tradition. In our religion, a woman has a right to choose," Naeem said.
`Struggle'
"As a woman and an MP, there are areas I want to concentrate on but that does not mean we have forgotten our struggle for our homeland, and preparing our children to die when the homeland calls for it," she said.
Naeem, a 37-year-old social worker at the Islamic University in Gaza City and a mother of four, is one of six women elected to parliament on the Hamas ticket in the Islamist party's landslide victory last month. They were due to be sworn in when the new parliament opened yesterday.
Women played a crucial role in getting out the vote for Hamas, knocking on doors and often getting a sympathetic hearing. Hamas's strategy to build political support through its social programmes -- the provision of health clinics, nurseries and food for the poor -- sealed the loyalty of many Palestinian women.
"Women are closer to the problems of the society," said Naeem.
"They are the ones who feel the unemployment. They are the ones who have to look after the children when their husbands are in prison. They feel well treated by Hamas institutions. Now these women are looking to us, the women in parliament, to change other things," she said.
Shortly before the election, Hamas launched a women's armed wing and pictured members brandishing guns and rocket-propelled grenades in its campaign posters. But the women MPs say their priority is reform, not armed struggle.
Jamila Shanti, a philosophy professor at the Islamic University who headed the list of Hamas's women candidates, says the female activists agree on the need to tackle discrimination.
"Our first job is to correct this because this is not Islam," she said. "We are going to show that women are not secondary, they are equal to men. Discrimination is not from Islam, it is from tradition. It may not be easy. Men may not agree," Shanti said.
Attempts in the last parliament to change laws that impose stiff punishments on women who commit adultery while going easy on men and provide relatively light sentences for "honor killings" of women who are deemed to have disgraced the family, ran into the sand amid resistance from older secular MPs.
Islah Jad, a lecturer in women's studies at Birzeit University, says the party is at odds with itself over women's rights.
"In 1999, they admitted for the first time that women are oppressed and they have a cause," Jad said.
"The second step is to attempt to formulate a kind of vision but it's very unstable. When family law was discussed they approved some reforms: that the age of marriage was 18 and that a woman can put any condition she wants in the marriage contract," she said.
`Shariah' law
"But when it came to the penal code and the punishment for adultery, [the late Hamas spiritual leader] Sheikh Yassin said it was based on Shariah law and shouldn't be touched," she said.
Many male leaders of Hamas favour the extension of Shariah to cover civil as well as criminal codes.
Some have said they want to segregate schools, others favour a ban on the sale of alcohol. They also want to see women dress in accordance with Islam.
Naeem says changes should come only after Hamas has taken time to explain the benefits of religious law. "Our Shariah is great if it's practised according to its values. It's not like they say about only cutting off hands," she said.
"It's not going to be forceful but anybody who believes in the religion has to be educated in it. At the end, what matters is fighting corruption, not what people wear," Naeem said.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
DITCH TACTICS: Kenyan officers were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch suspected to have been deliberately dug by Haitian gang members A Kenyan policeman deployed in Haiti has gone missing after violent gangs attacked a group of officers on a rescue mission, a UN-backed multinational security mission said in a statement yesterday. The Kenyan officers on Tuesday were on their way to rescue Haitian police stuck in a ditch “suspected to have been deliberately dug by gangs,” the statement said, adding that “specialized teams have been deployed” to search for the missing officer. Local media outlets in Haiti reported that the officer had been killed and videos of a lifeless man clothed in Kenyan uniform were shared on social media. Gang violence has left
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
Japan unveiled a plan on Thursday to evacuate around 120,000 residents and tourists from its southern islets near Taiwan within six days in the event of an “emergency”. The plan was put together as “the security situation surrounding our nation grows severe” and with an “emergency” in mind, the government’s crisis management office said. Exactly what that emergency might be was left unspecified in the plan but it envisages the evacuation of around 120,000 people in five Japanese islets close to Taiwan. China claims Taiwan as part of its territory and has stepped up military pressure in recent years, including
RSS