Nearly 20,000 babies have been born “in hell” in the Gaza Strip since the Israeli offensive against the Palestinian territory began more than three months ago, UNICEF reported on Friday.
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“This means that a baby is born every ten minutes in this terrible conflict,” Tess Ingram, spokeswoman for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), said at a news conference in Geneva.
Returning from Gaza, which has been the target of incessant Israeli bombing following the October 7 attack on Israel by the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, she recounted several cases that testified to the nightmarish situation there for pregnant women, nursing mothers and their children.
A nurse named Webda told him that she had performed emergency C-sections on six women who had died in the last eight weeks and had lost count of the number of miscarriages because of the stale air and smoke from the bombings.
She also recounted the case of a six-month pregnant Palestinian woman, Amal, who was buried under rubble during an attack. The baby didn't move for a week before it was finally born healthy, the day before it met Ms Ingram. However, in the turmoil of war, the young mother had no choice but to leave the hospital almost immediately with her little Sama and return to makeshift accommodation on the streets of Rafah.
“Becoming a mother should be a celebration. “In Gaza, this is like giving birth to a child in hell,” summarized Tess Ingram, for whom this “is unbelievable.”
She called for immediate international action in the face of a situation that “humanity cannot consider normal,” recalling that she only had access to the southern part of the Gaza Strip and that the situation in the north was “infinitely worse.”
“Seeing newborns suffering while some mothers bleed to death should prevent us from sleeping,” she said, adding: “Knowing that two very small Israeli children who were kidnapped on October 7 have still not been released , should also prevent us from sleeping.”
Among the young women she met, Iman told her how she ran through the bombed streets of Gaza while eight months pregnant. “Today, 46 days after a caesarean section, she is in hospital with a serious infection and is too weak to hold her newborn Ali in her arms,” Ms Ingram explained.
“Humanitarian ceasefire”
The war that has devastated Gaza and displaced more than 80% of the population was sparked by an unprecedented Hamas attack on October 7 in southern Israel that killed 1,140 people, mostly civilians, according to a report based on official figures AFP count shows.
During the attack, about 250 people were kidnapped and taken to Gaza, about 100 of whom were released during a ceasefire in late November. According to Israel, 132 people are still imprisoned, of whom 27 are believed to have died.
In retaliation, Israel vowed to destroy Hamas, which has been in power in Gaza since 2007. According to the Hamas Ministry of Health, 24,762 people, the vast majority women, children and young people, were killed and 61,830 injured in Israeli operations.
According to Unicef, the Emirati hospital in Rafah now receives the vast majority of pregnant women in the Gaza Strip. But staff are forced to discharge mothers three hours after a cesarean section due to overcrowding and limited resources.
After birth, the ordeal has just begun. There is a lack of everything: food, drinking water, medical care, adequate accommodation…
This results in infants “suffering more often from malnutrition, developmental problems and other health complications,” according to UNICEF.
The organization puts the number of children under the age of two at risk of severe malnutrition at “around 135,000”.
The current child mortality rate in Gaza cannot be determined, but “it is safe to say that children are dying today both because of the humanitarian crisis on the ground and because of the bombings and shootings,” he said. added Ms. Ingram. “Mothers and newborns need a humanitarian ceasefire.”