The Second Marriage of Hamas Prime Minister

The Palestinian Prime Minister of Hamas in Gaza, the leading figure of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), Ismail Abed Al-Salam Haniyeh (Abu Al-Abed), of age 47 years, has married a second wife next to his first wife, his cousin Amal Haniyeh, the daughter of his uncle.

The name of the new wife is not known yet, but it is thought to be the wife of one of his friends who was murdered by the Israelis during “Operation Cast Lead”. The new marriage is a disaster for Amal, his first wife, who gave birth to 13 boys and girl to her husband Ismail Haniyeh. The children of Ismail and Amal Haniyeh are Abed Al-Salam, 28, Hammam, 26, Wisam, 25, Moath, 24, Sana’a, 23 and married, Bothayna, 22 and married, Khawleh, 17, the twins A’ayed Hazem, 15, Amir, 14, Mohammad, 13, Latife, 11, and Sarah, 5.

Amal, Um Abed, married her cousin Ismail Haniyeh after her father paid the contribution of the marriage expenses. Ismail Haniyeh is the son of a brother of Amal’s father, who received him in his house and family when the father of Ismail died. Amal grew up together with her cousin Ismail in the house of her father, before marrying. She renounced going to university so that her father could pay for Ismail to attend university, until he received a bachelor’s degree in Arabic.

I doubt that Amal ever thought that her husband and cousin, the orphan who grew up under the protection of her father and who would later become leader of Hamas, would one day marry another wife, in this way betraying her after 30 years of marriage. No woman would like to see a fellow wife with her husband, no woman celebrated the second marriage of her husband, especially if she still healthy, beautiful and lives together with her children and husband.

A woman like Amal must be shocked after her husband married a second wife. This is the normal feeling of a woman who has spent most of her life giving children to her husband, who had sacrificed in her study, beauty, youth and everything in order to give him, Ismail Haniyeh, the chance to attend university and to work on his career. I think that a woman like Amal will be dying of pain after the second marriage of her husband. This feeling is never understood by Muslim men, who just think and understand that they “have the right” to marry 1 to 4 women in Islam. Men who grow up in this culture think of women like shoes: he can wear them and take them off anytime it pleases them.

It is certainly a shame for Amal, for any woman, to be abandoned by her husband at the age of 46, it is demeaning before her children, even her husband tries treat both women equally as is demanded by Islamic law. Amal, as so many women who have gone through this, will not be satisfied, not at all. No woman likes to have half a man and to see her husband have another woman.

Between 1999 -2000 I coordinated a documentary film about the second marriage in Islam. It was awful for me to hear what I heard from these Muslim women, who lived with a husband who had another wife. It was awful to hear the women raising their young children to hate the father. It was awful to hear the child wishing their fathers death. That is the reality of the second marriage. Whatever Islam considers this marriage, from the perspective of a a woman it is a disaster and clear violation of her dignity and her human rights.

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