Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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Forcibly displaced and suffering daily from breast cancer, 34-year-old Palestinian cosmetician, Samar Al-Jaal, finds joy in beautifying her cancer-ridden campmates using cosmetics. Samar lives in a tent with her young children in a camp with other forcibly displaced cancer patients in Gaza City.

Samar continues chemotherapy but the disease recently returned to her body and she continues to suffer. Unicorn Riot visited Al-Jaal as she worked on the faces of an elder and a youth in a wheelchair, both suffering from cancer.

Al-Jaal had hopes of obtaining a travel referral for medical care but she was rejected and has not been able to travel because of Israel’s war on Gaza.

However, she has a profession that she loves very much, cosmetics, and she uses her skills to beautify women with cancer inside the camp. “With the simplest tools, I try to bring joy to cancer patients,” said Samar.

Al-Jaal said, “I started this profession, despite my fatigue, because my husband was arrested by the occupation forces” and “I want to bring joy to cancer patients because I am a patient like them. And I suffer just like them; no one feels another’s pain like the one who experiences it.”

“When I work on them, they feel happy, they leave happily and joyfully. I love seeing them joyful, it fills me up with joy. Even if it’s a simple thing.” Samar Al-Jaal

“I am like them,” Al-Jaal said, “I don’t have eyebrows. I feel happy when I work on their eyebrows.” Chemotherapy, a treatment for cancer that uses powerful chemicals designed to kill cancer cells, has a myriad of side effects, including hair loss. Each session of chemotherapy leads to further hair loss.

Beyond the suffering involved with having cancer, “psychologically, it worsens little by little with each chemotherapy session when you look at yourself in the mirror and see yourself,” said Samar. “Chemotherapy sessions are really hard. Every time I go, my health goes backward, and I’m a mother of seven children.”

Al-Jaal said, “the whole camp is like a family. Thank God. I call them my friends, they are my friends in illness, my friends in struggle. Because we all feel for each other, as we are all patients.”

“She fixed my face and did my eyebrows,” said Maryam Al-Shibli after Samar colored her eyebrows.

Al-Shibli, another breast cancer patient, said she “felt at ease psychologically after seeing myself look somewhat normal … this disease has taken so much from me. It’s taken my hair and my breast. I had a mastectomy, but thank God. I try to take care of myself, even without the equipment.”

Full story: https://unicornriot.ninja/2025/beautifying-cancer-patients-in-gaza-while-being-prevented-from-life-saving-treatment/
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