There is little left of Hanaa Khodor in the dark ground-floor flat where she lived from the age of nine. A blusher palette and brush that she gave her half-sister. A small stove for making coffee she gave her father’s wife for Mother’s Day. Photographs of her smiling into the camera live only on the family’s phones. Otherwise, all her loved ones have of her are their memories.
The last time she came to visit, her stepmother recalls, the 21-year-old made crepes and prepared the morning coffee. She complained of fatigue but she was several months pregnant with her third child in the heavy heat of the Lebanese summer, so that wasn’t surprising. If she was worried about anything, she did not say.
“She was a girl who loved life,” says her father, Mohamed Khodor, a cleaner in Lebanon’s second city of Tripoli.
On the last day of her visit early last August, her husband came to take her home to where they lived, in another part of Tripoli, with their two sons. “Then in the afternoon I got a phone call saying my daughter was in the hospital,” says Khodor. He rushed there to find Hanaa “screaming with pain” and accusing her husband, he says, of dousing her with liquid gas from a canister they kept in the kitchen. “I asked her what had happened and she told me, ‘Dad, he burned me. He set me on fire.’”
Three days later, she lost her baby, and eight days after that, Hanaa was dead. “She suffered 100% burns,” including to the respiratory tract, says Dr Gabriel Sabeh, founder of Al Salam hospital in Tripoli. “From the beginning we could see that her case was hopeless but we cared for her as if she had a fighting chance, all the while knowing it would take a miracle for her to recover.”
Six months on, Hanaa’s family remain baffled and bereft. Her husband, a taxi driver, is in prison awaiting trial for murder, which he denies. Despite technically still having the death penalty, Lebanon has not executed anyone for nearly two decades, but Khodor, who “normally agree[s] with that”, does not in this case. “This was not a normal crime. This was a terrible crime,” he says. “I would pay my weight in gold to take him to her grave and burn him in front of it and tell her: I did the same to him as he did to you.”
Outside, around the door frame of his apartment, three tattered death notices flap in the winter breeze.
What allegedly happened to Hanaa Khodor was terrible and, in its method, unusual, but the murder of women by their husbands is not uncommon in this country, either among the Lebanese or the 1.5 million Syrian population. According to internal security forces, nine women were killed in domestic violence crimes between January and October last year, and 18 in 2021. The real number is thought to be far higher, with domestic abuse on the rise. “We know that not all the cases are reported,” says Mohamad Mansour, deputy director of Abaad, a gender equality NGO.
Although the constitution deems “all Lebanese equal before the law”, gender inequality is woven into the fabric of the nation through a combination of patriarchal values, unequal legislation and a legacy of “militarised masculinity” from past conflict, say activists, lawyers and academics. This is exacerbated by the country’s punishing economic crisis, with deepening poverty, endemic corruption, institutional dysfunction and political paralysis all reinforcing the vulnerability of the least powerful in society.
As in many other countries, this toxic brew perpetuates a low-level hostility towards women that causes discrimination, violence – and, at its most extreme, femicide: the killing of a woman because of her gender.
When that happens her family is left reeling. “If I had had any idea that this would happen to her I wouldn’t have left her with him,” says Mohammad Kanjo, whose daughter, Zeina, was allegedly killed by her husband, Ibrahim Ghazal, in January 2021. “It’s like something is missing from your body, something that is not replaceable.”
Growing up in the northern region of Akkar, not far from the border with Syria, one of the most deprived parts of Lebanon, Zeina Kanjo nursed the idea of a different kind of life. Mohammad had six daughters but to him, “she was worth the other five put together. She was clever, she was joyful, she knew things. She told me a few times she wished she was not a girl but a boy. Because men have more power, and girls … aren’t always allowed to lead the lives they want.”
It was this sense of ambition, perhaps, that led Zeina to come to Beirut. Though she had left high school after just a year, she was tech-savvy and photogenic, building up an Instagram presence and making plans to open a beauty salon. Then, in 2020, she represented her country at a beauty contest in Egypt as “Miss Elegant Lebanon”, and it was there that she appears to have met her future husband. More recently, according to her mother, Fatmeh, she had decided to start a family and “have children and give them a better life than that of her siblings”.
However, all was not well in the marriage – not that Zeina told her parents. Several days before her death the 33-year-old sat in the Beirut offices of high-profile lawyer Ashraf Mousawi, telling him she wanted to sue her husband for fraud. “We were in complete shock when we learned of her death because we didn’t expect in any way that he would kill her,” says Mousawi. “We did not expect that it would reach this level of violence.”
Forensic experts found that Zeina, whose body was found in the smart apartment she shared with Ghazal, had been suffocated. “I didn’t intend to and I didn’t think she would die,” he told one of her sisters in a phone call later broadcast on television.
Hours after her death, Ghazal had fled to Turkey. He managed to evade arrest until December when, according to Mousawi, now the Kanjo family’s lawyer, he was detained in Stockholm under an Interpol red notice. What will happen next is unclear: Sweden will only extradite a suspect if it receives assurances they will not face a death sentence. Swedish police declined to comment.
What chance do the Kanjo family have of justice? “That’s hard to answer,” says Mousawi. “They are counting on me and sadly not the judicial system.” Lebanon’s judges staged a five-month strike last year in protest at their declining salaries in the economic crisis, leading to the paralysis of the legal system and court business.
Mousawi says this acted as a further motivating factor for male abusers who already felt enabled, consciously or subconsciously, by the entrenched patriarchal values of Lebanese society. As Nadia Badran, president of the social workers’ syndicate, says: “Because men can do it, they do it.”
To those working to reduce Lebanon’s rate of violence against women, it can feel like a hopeless battle, constantly fighting for airtime amid the country’s series of crises. Just in the past three years the Lebanese have been hit by the Covid lockdowns, the devastating Beirut port blast, and economic meltdown, each shock ratcheting up the strain. How can a society tear down the patriarchy when it can’t keep the street lights on?
“Every day we have a new issue in this country,” says Zoya Rouhana, a veteran women’s rights campaigner.
The dramatic devaluation of the Lebanese pound since 2019 has pushed nearly 80% of the population into poverty, according to the UN, exacerbating old problems and creating new ones. “The level of stress is high. For men and women. Everyone in the country is stressed,” says Mansour.
“Now we see that women are more concerned with securing the basic needs of their children, like food and clothes, more than about the violence they are subjected to,” says Rouhana, director of the NGO Kafa. “This is a second priority for them.
“Many women are now afraid of raising a case against their husband because they have no alternative place to live,” she adds. “The shelters are almost full.”
Equally concerning is the impact of the crisis on education: like judges, teachers have been on strike, and when the schools do open, Mansour says, the daughters of impoverished families are always “the first to be withdrawn”.
Child marriage is on the rise again, with parents desperate for a dowry payment of $50 to $100 (£41 to £82) and for someone else to take on the responsibility of feeding a teenager. “A marriage that starts on that basis, I don’t think it’s a healthy marriage that will continue in a healthy way,” says Mansour.
Hanaa, who left school at 11 and was married at 16, learned that, perhaps, the hard way.
Alongside these challenges runs a parallel problem: a lack of political leadership. Lebanon has a caretaker cabinet with limited powers, no president, and a fragmented parliament.
No one expects any work to be done on the things that could really change women’s lives for the better, including reform to the contentious personal status laws – 15 separate religious-based laws which mean that a woman’s rights in terms of custody, divorce and marriage vary according to her sect – and the citizenship law, which means a Lebanese woman cannot pass her nationality to her children.
It’s not only gender related-work, says Mansour. “Everything has stopped in the country.”
For the families of the women already gone, the only thing that counts now is justice – something far from assured. Zeina’s parents, who are living in an agonising limbo, nurse just one hope: that their daughter’s killer will one day be brought to book. “I hope the Swedish authorities will hand him over to the Lebanese authorities and he will face justice here,” says Fatmeh. “I hope I see him hanging on a rope. I hope his mother’s heart will burn like he burned my heart.”
“I would not hurt an ant,” says Mohammad. “But I would like to cut him like a sheep, and take him to her grave to be slaughtered.”
