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unhappycamper

(60,364 posts)
Sun Jun 22, 2014, 07:31 AM Jun 2014

Gaza in Crisis: The Strong Female Voice of Hamas

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/isra-al-mudallal-is-the-spokesperson-for-hamas-in-gaza-a-976150.html



Isra al-Mudallal is the outspoken, strong-willed new spokesperson for the Hamas government in Gaza. Her goal is to become a role model for young girls -- but first she has to overcome the region's conservative traditions.

Gaza in Crisis: The Strong Female Voice of Hamas
By Julia Amalia Heyer
June 20, 2014 – 04:20 PM



Give me a minute, the delicate-looking woman behind the giant desk says. With her right hand, Isra al-Mudallal pulls a prayer rug out of her handbag, with her left, she lifts her daughter from the floor onto her lap. She places a sheet of paper and crayons in front of the child, kisses her on the temple, and then the first female spokesperson for the Islamist organization Hamas disappears into the next room to pray.

But I have an appointment, says a gray-suited employee of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, the German center-left political foundation, as she rushes past him. "You'll have to wait," Muddallal says, and leaves the man sitting there in her office on the third floor of a dusty high-rise in Gaza City.

When the prayer is finished and the man is able to introduce himself, he talks about former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who opened the foundation's office in Gaza. Does she know, he asks, that German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had recently been for a visit?

"Interesting," Mulallal says, in very British fashion. Her smartphone vibrates. She is 23 years old, wearing a blue blazer, a tight jersey skirt and Ray-Ban eyeglasses.
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