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Eleonora Masini asks:
Compared to our previous visit to the Palestinian territories,
did we find the situation better or worse for women and girls?
I gave a lot of thought to this issue because in November 2008, when I was in Gaza and the West Bank,
it was with women leaders, and we were particularly focusing on women and girls
and listening to their situation.
So when we had the opportunity, more recently,
first of all to go to Gaza, I was particularly interested to see
what the situation was, and sadly I think it is worse
in the sense that girls and young women feel very constrained
and there is this real sense of watching whether young girls are behaving,
and when we met a 21-year old as part of a group of young people,
she said to us, you know, it's very difficult to have fun here
and you had that real sense of encroaching on private space
of the population - partly because of the isolation of Gaza.
In the West Bank, I think things are possibly better
from the point of view of freedom of movement, and the economy is a bit better
but, once again, there wasn't really a sense of
women feeling that they were benefiting particularly - women and girls -
but it's certainly a better situation than in Gaza.
We had a good discussion in Ramallah about women being part of the peace process
under the Security Council Resolution 1325
- that we're marking the 10th anniversary of -
and we asked about whether there were any women involved
in the discussions that have been taking place between Fatah and Hamas,
with a view to possibly reconciling and coming together.
And of course, there's no women involved in that
and no women really involved in the peace discussions, as such.
So that's something that women themselves felt needed to be addressed.