GAZA CITY: Khaled Kahlut just popped out with his sons to buy some bread. Hit by an Israeli missile, they never came home. Now his widow Manal must learn to navigate through life in patriarchal Gaza with no men by her side.

The 32-year-old has joined a grim contingent growing by the hour in Gaza — widows who must now feed their families and live their lives alone in the conservative Palestinian enclave.

“Why did you leave us, why?” wails the young woman, who must now bring up her three daughters on her own.

“My husband and my three sons fell as martyrs and I no longer have a single man in the house.” “What am I going to do with my daughters, who is going to take care of us?” she says, wringing her hands. “What have these girls done to grow up without a father or brothers?”

Her husband and three sons died when an Israeli missile struck their car as they returned home from their trip to the bakery. “They were torn to shreds.”

Manal sits inside the house of her brother-in-law in the Jabaliya refugee camp, her relatives trying to console her in vain. “Her loss is too much for a human to bear,” says one, Umm Mohamad.

In Gaza, where social trends have leaned toward the conservative even before the Islamist Hamas seized power in June 2007, the prospect of living alone as a woman is not a cheerful one.

Most women in the territory, where more than half of the 1.5 million population are children, do not work, so the question of how to earn an income becomes an urgent and uncertain one.

Tradition in Gaza holds that widows of “martyrs” do not remarry, so the prospect of finding another breadwinner is not a viable one — even if you are just 20 years old like Nidaa Hammuda.

Hammuda lost her husband and two brothers on the same day that Manal’s husband and sons were killed.

“I was devastated to learn of their martyrdom,” she says. “I lost my husband Ahmed, my brothers Mohammed and Munir and their cousin Nasser at the same time.” The four men, all members of Hamas, died during the first day of Israel’s offensive, in an airstrike against a building that housed a prisoner rights association run by Hamas.

“Two days before his martyrdom my husband told me to take care of our two sons, Adnan and Amin, and of his mother, as if he knew he were going to die,” she said.

The widow of her brother, Duaa Hammuda, 27, says she will educate their four children “in the mosques, like their father would have wanted to.”