REPORTER: Chris Hammer
Gaza City - Palestinian mothers gather at the Red Crescent compound, demanding the release of their sons from Israeli jails, and here to lend their support are two of the most powerful men in Hamas, Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, not that the women are overawed - the Hamas leaders are copping a tongue-lashing.
WOMAN (Translation): We voted for change and we want a real change. The most important cause of all is that of our children.
They may rank amongst the most feared men in the Middle East but on this occasion the two leaders grin and bear it.
WOMAN (Translation): Our children make us stand tall. They can put people in power or remove them.
And observing quietly in the background are a group of newly-elected female Hamas MPs, including mother-of-four Huda Naim.
HUDA NAIM, MP (Translation): The Palestinians underwent a lot of oppression. During the occupation it was the killings, displacement, exiles and evictions. Within the Palestinian family I think the woman is the most vulnerable. She feels oppression the most. Her desire and her need for change spoke louder than any other section of society.
Gaza City and its surrounds fill a 45km stretch of Palestinian land - the Gaza Strip. More than a million people live here, largely cut off from the rest of the world. It's one of the highest population densities on the planet, and amongst the poorest.
Someone who knows all about poverty is Nahida Sleibi. Six years ago her husband damaged his spine and was left unable to work or repair their dilapidated house.
NAHIDA SLEIBI, (Translation): The roof was corrugated iron, it wasn't good - it leaked in winter. In general, it was unsuitable to live in.
Neither the UN nor the Palestinian Authority responded to the family's pleas for help, but Hamas did. In return, it won the family's thanks, and also their votes. Yet Nahida says her vote was not just for Hamas but against the incumbents, Fatah, the party established by Yasser Arafat.
NAHIDA SLEIBI, (Translation): With regards to Fatah, ever since they came to power we didn't really benefit from them. As far as we knew there were funds for Fatah, the Authority. We didn't benefit from Fatah in general or in particular.
Not far from Nahida's house is the Al-Salah Benevolent School, run by an Hamas-affiliated charity. Like most schools, boys and girls are segregated. This school is exclusively for orphans. In Palestinian culture that means any child that's without a father.
Hamas oversees a network of charitable organisations that run schools, hospitals and other services and have established a reputation for being efficient and corruption-free. Huda Naim is a graduate of the Hamas-run Islamic University of Gaza.
HUDA NAIM, (Translation): Hamas organisations showed high standards of transparency, cleanliness and administrative and academic capabilities. The Islamic University, the health organisations in Gaza, for instance, are excellent examples of the future Palestinian Authority under Hamas's leadership.
While these institutions, like this Hamas-affiliated hospital, demonstrated the party's administrative credentials, it was its outreach programs that provided Hamas with the grassroots network to lock in the women's vote.
HUDA NAIM, (Translation): We had within the organisation an army of women who liaised with ordinary women in society. They did so on a personal level. On family occasions, Hamas women in the area supported women in the neighbourhood. This translated positively during elections.
Intisar Al-Wazir is a Fatah Member of Parliament and a political veteran. She's the widow of Abu Jihad, Yasser Arafat's number two, who was assassinated in Tunis in 1989. She gives Hamas credit for targeting women voters.
INTISAR AL-WAZIR, FATAH MP (Translation): They are very organised. They were able to reach out to women through financial assistance, especially as our society is in a state of poverty. More than 70% of our people live below the poverty line.
Yet it's not the grinding poverty that I find the most striking thing about Gaza, it's the portraits of dead Palestinians - in every square, at almost every street corner there are pictures of young men who have died in the struggle.
I come across the wake of the leader of the local Hamas militia, one of the Qassam Brigades, assassinated just two days before. His portrait already dominates his house, his status as a martyr already enshrined.
For many Palestinians - men and women - the deciding factor in the election was the conflict with Israel. The perception is that Fatah negotiated with Israel and got less than nothing in return, while the armed resistance of Hamas forced the Israelis to withdraw from Gaza.
INTISAR AL-WAZIR (Translation): The former policy pursued by the Authority and Fatah - the policy of peace - was met from the Israeli side with continuous aggression, confiscation of land, building of the wall, expansion of settlements, assassination of individuals and leaders by Apache helicopters, and failure to recognise the Authority as a partner.
All this played a part - the harsh economic conditions - all this meant the assistance Hamas gave to the people won them over to its side.
Intisar Al-Wazir says Israel only has itself to blame for the rise of Hamas.
INTISAR AL-WAZIR (Translation): It helped Hamas win by its actions against us.
The new Palestinian parliament meets. It now includes 17 women, 6 of them representing Hamas, but all six won on a party list, not in their own right, and were on the list because, by law, women must fill a certain quota. Of those elected only this woman, Mariam Farhat, the so-called mother of the martyrs, featured prominently in the Hamas election campaign.
Farhat is featured in a campaign video farewelling one of her sons as he prepares to attack Israel, killing five before being killed himself. It's the use of violence, including suicide bombers and targeting civilians, that has led the US and Australia to proscribe Hamas as a terrorist organisation.
Three of Mariam Farhat's sons have died fighting the Israelis, but the Hamas leadership has now instructed the controversial 'mother of the martyrs' not to speak to foreign media.
So instead I ask Huda Naim, a mother of two sons, one a teenager, how she would feel if they became suicide bombers.
HUDA NAIM, (Translation): Day after day my sons, Suhaib and Mohammed, wake to the sound of bombings and killings. On TV, children and martyrs are ripped to pieces. It's a culture the occupation imposed on my son. I'd love Mohammed to be like any other child, but because this culture was forced upon me I must raise him to be strong, to defend his country.
In all wars of liberation, even during the Second World War, mothers pushed their children, for the sake of the homeland, to obtain freedom. They taught their children that, by defending their homeland, they give life to thousands of people.
BUS CAMPAIGN (Translation): In the name of Allah the Beneficent, an inclusive invitation, people of this neighbourhood.
Palestinians are proud of their democratic election.
BUS CAMPAIGN (Translation): The Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, calls upon you to join in a major public march immediately after evening prayer.
Flying over the houses are the flags marking party allegiances - yellow for Fatah, green for Hamas, the occasional black of Islamic Jihad. While Fatah lost the election they've won credit for accepting the result and peacefully handing over power.
But now Palestinian women must come to terms with replacing Fatah and its secular values with Hamas and its Islamic ones.
HUDA NAIM, (Translation): I'd like to see sharia law applied in Palestine but how we do it is crucial.
In fact, Hamas says sharia will not be introduced during the liberation struggle. Huda Naim quotes the Koran.
HUDA NAIM, (Translation): "Reason with them courteously." "No compulsion in religion." I must present my ideas and talk them over with people, but I will never force anyone against their will.
To judge what other women think I went to the kind of place one doesn't usually associate with a place like Gaza - a nightclub called Roots. Here I find a group of Palestinian yuppies, dubbed Kit Kats back in another era when the wealthy few who could travel brought chocolates back from abroad.
It's a corporate night for Jawal, the Palestinian mobile phone company, and in amongst the educated young executives I met three articulate young women. Suhad is a Fatah supporter.
SUHAD, (Translation): First of all, Hamas said there would be freedom. Every person would have freedom of thought freedom to wear what you like. If they stick to their word, I have nothing to worry about, but if they don't there might be something that I don't like and I'll be forced to do. OK, I support Islam - our religion is so beautiful - but we have to apply it as a whole, not just the part about appearance.
Nuha was abroad during the election.
NUHA (Translation): I'd have liked Hamas to change its foreign policy to be more flexible. We're concerned the international community might reject us, and hence things like electricity, water, gas and petrol will be refused to us.
Her friend Ola voted for Hamas.
OLA (Translation): We wanted a change. We saw what Fatah did, we want to see what Hamas will do, then we'll decide. At the next stage, if there's another election, if Hamas proves responsible, we'll re-elect them. If not, we'll elect neither.
And for Ola, the yardstick is how Hamas deals with the Israeli occupation.
OLA (Translation): Hamas is no problem, as a leadership or anything. As long as they wipe the Jews off the map. OK, Israel. It's the occupiers, that's the point.
Palestinian women have placed their trust in the men of Hamas. Now they wait and see if Hamas can deliver, not just good services and corruption-free government but some way forward in the decades-old struggle against the Israelis.