Gaza: Where Murder of Women Is Easy

From Gaza: Gaza: Where Murder of Women Is Easy:

At 10 p.m., Yehia Abu Moghaseb, a Gaza gravedigger, watched several men lift three large bundles wrapped in black plastic from the back of a car and carelessly dropped them into freshly dug pits lined with cinderblocks at the Martyrs' Cemetery in Wadi Salgah. They shoveled a few scoops of sand on top, before driving off. "There's no police," he recalled later, so Abu Moghaseb asked a neighbor to call the Hamas-controlled "Executive Force."

When a doctor tore open the black body bags, inside were three young women, two of them still in their teens. Two of the girls had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest; the third had her throat cut. Abu Moghaseb explained that the murders had been honor killings, which are becoming increasingly common in lawless Gaza. "There is a very clear increase in the killing of women," says Issam Younis, the director of Gaza City's Al Mezan Center for Human Rights.