Safe houses for battered women open in Gaza

Since beating your wife is sanctioned in Islam (see sura 4 verse 34) it is no wonder Gazan women are abused.  I am glad to see some measure of a safe haven for these women, who ultimately are victims of Islam.

I wonder how many leftist/feminists are sending their hard-earned money to these shelters, or are spending time at these same safe houses to help these women suffering under the thumb of 1,400 years of secind-class citizenship?

Anybody?  Hello!?

From Arabian Business July 25

Wife battering in Gaza spotlight

Most safe-houses in the Gaza Strip are meant to provide protection for armed militants on Israel's target list. Now Gaza is offering protected shelter to battered Palestinian women.

Its lone women's safe-house, opened two months ago, has had eight clients, all guarded by police from the Islamist Hamas movement that runs the enclave and enforces a conservative though not radical Muslim religious code.

So-called 'honour killings' are rare but not unknown among religious Palestinians of Gaza and the West Bank, and like every society it is not immune to wife-beating.

True, but if your religious texts and tenets tell you it is OK to beat your wife if she is uppity then yours is not like every society.

"In 2010 there was no record of killing under the motive of family honor and this is a positive development," said Huda Naeem, a Hamas lawmaker who backed the safe house as a way station for women at risk within their own families.

But feminism in Gaza is a very fragile plant.

Women in many Arab communities can be killed by zealous relatives on the slightest suspicion of having relations with a strange man. And jurists in Gaza say there is no clear clause in the Palestinian law setting out the penalty for such murders.

Islam also prohibits adultery and some Islamic teachings call for the stoning to death of offenders.

Sobheya Joma, a woman lawyer at the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR), said there was no way to know for sure if honor killings were really eradicated.

"The ICHR is worried because it has recently noticed that some deaths were listed as unexplained or accidental," Joma told Reuters in her Gaza city office.

"As long as there is no investigation into these cases and the real causes were not uncovered, you are still going to have doubts," she said.

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