Madina Bagdi said her family was struggling to pay the rent, the electricity bill and the bills for medicine.

She said her youngest child was diagnosed with a disease after he fell down a flight of stairs one day and hit his head on the hard floor.

“We took him to hospital then they said he had permanent brain damage. I told him ‘I am a Muslim and I do not harm people’. He kept saying ‘I am Muslim’ and [he] keeps on saying ‘I am Muslim’ until doctors said he couldn’t speak. They just told me to leave.”

The doctor gave her permission to pay up and told her not to worry, Bagdi said.

She said the family can still pay, but because they are Muslims, they need to go elsewhere to pay.

“I don’t know what to do in the long run,” she said.

Other Palestinians blame the Israeli authorities for the problems Muslims face, with some complaining about the restrictions on religious practice that are often placed on Muslims in Israel by the government and the army.

“I have to pay for my shoes. I have to go to the mosque five times a day for prayer sessions,” said Bilala Ahmad, a woman with 15 children from the West Bank town of Kiryat Arba. “They shut it down for us and they don’t give us any choice.”

Another of Ahmad’s daughters, 22, said she pays for her daughter’s medical bills using her monthly allowance.

“At times I would make do. But even so, I could not get my daughter to a hospital,” she said.

She said this is the toughest situation for her family.

At the health center, Mohammed Abu Ghannad said he, too, had to pay, but for a “small price”, as he said his son’s condition allowed him to continue his farming business in the area.

A woman from the village of Deir al-Balah, where the mosque used to be, said she spent a year trying to persuade a local resident to build a concrete building to house the mosque.

“I told him I was very busy and if they built a new building, I would help it out by giving him the money for it and then he would start work. But he turned me down.”

A spokesman for the West Bank mayor’s office said the municipality has a policy of