In a ramshackle Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, Hayat Shehadeh wrings her hands as she watches the Israel-Hamas war. Her daughter is in Gaza, and she has not spoken to her for a week.
“I can’t sleep. I get up at 3:00 am… I go to watch the television,” said the 69-year-old from her dark flat in south Beirut’s Burj al-Barajneh Palestinian camp.
“Sometimes she writes to me, ‘I’m fine’. She doesn’t write more than that” because she has no way to recharge her phone battery, said the elderly woman, a baby grandchild playing with a Palestinian flag on the floor nearby.
With pain in her voice but trying to maintain her composure, Shehadeh said her daughter had separated her three children, sending them away with different relatives.
“She was crying, she said ‘I split up the kids’,” her mother said, so that “if someone dies, they don’t all die.”
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