On the verge of giving birth in the middle of a war zone and under bombardment, many pregnant women in Gaza are forced to flee to give birth in a safe place.
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While he was sleeping peacefully, Khulood Khaled was awakened last week by the sound of air strikes. Panicked, she then felt pain in her abdomen and feared she was going into labor, she told CNN.
She was eight months pregnant and decided the next day to leave her home in the north of the Gaza Strip to flee to Khan Younis in the south of the territory.
“We saw houses collapsing as we drove and thought we could die at any moment,” she told CNN.
Since then, Khulood Khaled has lived on a piece of dry bread while Gaza suffers from food shortages, as well as a lack of electricity and water. “I don’t know if the bread will be available tomorrow.”
Nardeen Fares experiences almost the same situation. She is nine months pregnant and risks giving birth any day. The 27-year-old young woman fled her al-Rimal neighborhood and also ended up in Khan Younis.
She now shares a six-bedroom house with almost 80 other people.
“As a woman who is in the last month of her pregnancy, God knows when this will happen and what the situation will be at that time,” she told American media. “Bombing or not, we don’t know what will happen at this point.”
According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), nearly 50,000 women in Gaza are pregnant and 10% are expected to give birth within the next month.
“Imagine going through this process in the last stages and last trimester before birth, with possible complications, without clothes, without hygiene, without support and without knowing what the next day, the next hour, will be Next minute will bring her unborn child,” Dominic Allen, UNFPA representative for the State of Palestine, told CNN.