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Displacement, hunger push some desperate families in Gaza to marry off their children

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Warning: The following includes descriptions of sexual violence DEIR AL-BALAH, Gaza Strip (AP) — Majda was destitute. Her husband and eldest son were killed by Israeli airstrikes. Living in a ragged tent in Gaza with rats and the stench of sewage, she couldn’t support her children and feared her daughters would be harassed going to the communal latrine in a camp with hundreds of strangers. So she made a decision she now deeply regrets. She married off her 13- and 14-year-old daughters to men who promised safety and support. “I thought I was protecting them,” she said. “Fear was slaughtering me.” The devastation of two years of war — sparked by Hamas’s October 7, 2023, invasion and massacre in southern Israel — has wreaked havoc in Gaza and helped fuel an increase in marriages of young girls, according to experts and official data.…

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