Gaza's fallen women:

Doing time for 'moral' crime

Najwa Abu Amra cries inside a Gaza jail as she explains how she got here. Struggling to care for two sons and a drug-addicted husband, she agreed to sleep with a man for about 50 dollars.

She had resisted prostitution in the past, but she was getting desperate.

"My husband isn't normal, he was telling me to sleep with men because they would give him money," She said. "He did what he liked and he didn't give me anything. I didn't know what to do".

Her husband showed no interest in caring for their two boys, one aged nine, the other just three. When she walked out, trying to prod him into better behaviour, he married a second wife.

"I had two sons, one of them is deaf, I didn't have a choice," she explains as the other women prisoners look on, some of them clutching their own children.

Out of desperation, she dialed the number of a man she had met months earlier, and agreed to sleep with him for 200 shekels (54 dollars or 41 euros).

Not long afterwards, Abu Amra was arrested on suspicion of immoral behaviour.

She was hauled before a judge and ordered to attend 30 days of pre-trial detention at the Training and Reform Centre for Women, Gaza's only prison for women.

The facility is run by Hamas, which has been in control of the Gaza Strip since 2007. The group won legislative elections in 2006, and a year later seized control of the coastal enclave after deadly confrontations with rival Fatah.

Since coming to power, the Islamist group has sought to bolster Gaza's conservative religious mores, although it has rescinded some controversial measures, including one banning women from publicly smoking the water pipe.

Dawn