As Israel warns of a months-long war and steps up airstrikes on Gaza, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency, known as UNFPA, estimates it has trapped 50,000 pregnant women in a humanitarian nightmare. About 5,500 of those women are expected to give birth next month and face the prospect of doing so alone as Gaza’s health system collapses under the Israeli blockade and increasing airstrikes make getting to a medical facility a dangerous ordeal .
Dominic Allen, the UNFPA representative for the Palestinian territories, said on Monday that individually wrapped emergency packages for at least half of the women due to give birth continue to be held in the humanitarian aid convoys arriving in Egypt on permission waiting to enter Gaza.
The kits are spartan. Each resealable plastic bag contains a bar of soap, a plastic wrap approximately 40 x 40 inches in size, a pair of scissors for cutting the umbilical cord, three pieces of umbilical tape, two cotton towels for cleaning and covering the mother and child, a pair of latex examination gloves, and an instruction booklet Guides women through their deliveries.
UNFPA maternity kits provide instructions to reduce the risk of infection for pregnant women who may need to deliver their own babies in a crisis. Source: United Nations Population Fund
UNFPA considers the kits a “last resort” to prevent infections during delivery when there is no safe or reliable access to a health facility. However, this circumstance has become the norm since the war began in Gaza. And as their deliveries approach, “many of the pregnant women don’t know where they will be in the next minute or the next day,” Mr. Allen said.
An estimated 19,000 pregnant women were among more than a million people ordered by Israel to leave the northern Gaza Strip last week, according to the Palestinian Association for Family Planning and Protection, a nonprofit affiliate of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. The group said in a statement that women in Gaza have lost their pregnancies due to the stress and shock of the war.
Itimad Abu Ward, a midwife and nurse who works as a WHO health officer, was among those forced to flee the northern Gaza Strip. She said it was nearly impossible to care for pregnant women during the chaotic journey south.
In a telephone interview from Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, Ms Abu Ward said she met a pregnant woman at a United Nations shelter last week who needed to go to hospital urgently – she was in labor and had complained about reduced fetal movement .
But it took two days to find safe transport and an open bed for the woman at nearby Nasser Hospital, Ms Abu Ward said. She feared she wouldn’t be able to help patients in similar situations.
Ms Abu Ward spoke to The Times from the Khan Younis Training Center, where an estimated 17,000 displaced people are taking shelter in overcrowded shelters with limited water and sanitation facilities.
As the center’s power continued to go out and explosions thundered outside, she said the few medical supplies – gloves, umbilical cord ties, clean towels – she was able to bring with her when her family left their home in Jabaliya were not enough to save one to save pregnant woman when she starts bleeding.
Even the donated first aid kit that Ms. Abu Ward uses to treat minor injuries at the center lacks basic tools like thermometers, she said, and when she recently treated a new mother and her feverish 25-day-old baby, this was the case the case forced to estimate the baby’s temperature manually.
Gaza’s hospitals and maternity wards, which lack water and fuel, are not much better equipped. Medicines for potentially life-threatening pregnancy complications, such as magnesium sulfate to treat preeclampsia, are running low and cannot be replenished unless more humanitarian aid is approved, said Mr. Allen, the UNFPA official.
Urgently needed supplies are also being held in the aid convoys for medical workers in Gaza to perform basic obstetric procedures such as stitching perineal tears and more complex procedures such as delivering a child by cesarean section, he said.
Ms. Abu Ward said that if this aid and more of it are not allowed and pregnant women in Gaza can safely resume their regular prenatal and postnatal appointments, she expects the maternal mortality rate to rise.
“We try to help as much as we can, but sometimes we don’t succeed,” she said. “The future is very, very bleak.”