Name: Nihad Muhareb Joudeh
Location: Originally from Rafah, currently displaced in Al-Mawasi, Khan Younis
Occupation: Kindergarten worker and Head of the Kindergarten Workers’ Union in the Gaza Strip

I am Nihad Muhareb Joudeh, originally from Rafah. From 2017, I worked in Al-Ahmad Kindergarten together with other teachers, and all of us were supporting large families through this work. One of our colleagues was suffering from cancer. The kindergarten was not only our workplace, it was our dream and our only source of income. By the end of 2023, the kindergarten had around 100 children enrolled.

The kindergarten in Rafah was completely destroyed with all its contents. Since 2024, we, like all the residents of Rafah, have been displaced to Al-Mawasi area in Khan Younis. Today we live a life of humiliation in tents with our families. My family consists of 20 people: myself, my sick husband, my daughters, my son and his small children, and my divorced daughter with her children. The tent we live in is extremely small for all of us.

Life in the tents provides no privacy for women and girls. The tents are very close to each other, and girls cannot move around alone inside the displacement camp, because of fear of harassment or harm from others.

I am also sick. I underwent open-heart surgery and need specialized care and a special diet, but there is no source of income at all. I also support my divorced daughter and her young children. We have not received any assistance except food parcels containing flour and canned food from the World Food Programme once every three months.

The conditions in the tents are extremely bad for all age groups. We rent the land, where the tent is placed and pay 500 shekels monthly. We also suffer every day to bring water from outside the camp, and we have to buy it because it is not free.

Our food now depends completely on charity kitchens, which are unable to meet the needs. We are forced to wait in very long lines under the sun and cold weather, with men and women crowded together. In many cases, fights and assaults happen between people, because of overcrowding while trying to obtain food. The meals themselves are poor in quality and mostly consist only of rice.

Nowadays everyone suffers from malnutrition and diseases that we do not even know how to diagnose, in addition to the widespread skin diseases among women and children. Women also suffer greatly when washing clothes, because there are no washing machines, and we have returned to washing everything by hand. As a heart patient, I can barely carry out my responsibilities as a mother.

We hope the war will end, that people will be allowed to return to Rafah, and that we can at least put tents on the rubble of our homes. We once had large, fully equipped homes, but today we suffer from poverty, unemployment, lack of proper shelter, and the complete absence of income.

I am the head of the Kindergarten Workers’ Union in Gaza Strip, a legally registered union, but today I stand unable to provide any support to our members or even support myself. There are no fewer than one thousand women workers in this sector, and today they are all unemployed. These conditions stopped our work, our communication with workers, and even our ability to update memberships or know where many workers are now located. We lost contact with many of them, because of the war and the collapse of our union work. Many kindergarten workers continue contacting me, because they lost their income and need support, but honestly, we are helpless in front of this catastrophe.

We need urgent and real intervention to save us from this tragic reality and from the rats and insects that bite our children’s bodies every day, while we are unable to do anything.