"The project to combat violence against women" meets the partner organisations

Gaza / public relations
Yesterday the Palestinian NGO Network and the Palestinian Center for Democracy and Conflict Resolution held a lengthy meeting with the partner organisations in the project to combat violence against women, at the network's premises in Gaza.
The meeting was attended by the project coordinator Hossam Ahmed, the project adviser Dunia Al-Amal Ismail, and many representatives of the partner organisations.
At the start of the meeting Ahmed welcomed the participants, noting that the project will target organisations in the first place in order to push them to take part in adopting the combating of violence against women and to work on unifying efforts to achieve that aim.
Ahmed added that this project, funded by Norwegian People's Aid, will continue over two months and will be crowned by a conference on combating violence against women, noting that it is being carried out in both halves of the homeland, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
He went on to mention the website launched with the project's launch at the beginning of this month, which will act as an observatory for all the figures and statistics dealing with violence against women, calling on organisations to take part in the website each according to its field.
For her part, the project adviser presented the concepts paper on which the series of workshops planned for next week is to be built, due to begin in Beit Lahia in the north of the Gaza Strip.
Ismail noted that a number of strands will be addressed in the six workshops, namely a strand on the social dimensions of violence against women, the legal dimensions of the phenomenon of violence, and the religious dimensions of violence against women.
She said: "Reading violence against women today requires of us a new vision that involves demolishing many structures and building new ones that champion the values of the age and genuinely take into account the particularity of the reality we live in, without overlooking the changes and transformations that have affected the women's cause as a whole in its dialectical entanglement with the national cause and the social dimension."
The participants agreed on the need for networking and coordination in order to protect Palestinian women from the violence inflicted on them, particularly community violence, calling on decision-makers to settle the legal environment instead of the fragmentation it is in.