“My experience during birth was literally a nightmare or something like a horror movie,” said 29-year-old Wajiha al-Abyad.
Her contractions began around 9pm on October 29th. “We called an ambulance but they told us they couldn’t come. The streets were empty and pitch black, and there was no sound except the noise of planes and shells.”
After about 40 minutes an ambulance actually arrived. It transported them at high speed through Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. “Most of the roads were badly damaged. I was stuck inside, struggling with contractions and convulsions as the ambulance raced through destroyed streets.”
Women, children and newborns in Gaza disproportionately bear the burden of war, both as victims and through limited access to health services. The UN estimates that there are around 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza and that more than 160 babies are born every day.
Within weeks, Ms. al-Abyad’s life was turned upside down. She fled her home in Gaza City with many of her relatives on October 14 after the Israeli military ordered over a million people to leave the northern Gaza Strip. The thought of giving birth under these circumstances terrified her. “The tension and fear I felt was more painful than the contractions,” she said.
Since the outbreak of war, the crossings into Gaza have been closed, meaning her husband in the United Arab Emirates has been unable to be by her side. Instead, she accompanied her mother in the ambulance.
Together they reached Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat, about a 20-minute drive from their home. They discovered that the hospital’s maternity ward was no longer functioning: it had been repurposed to treat the large number of war casualties.
“There was a lot of tension and shouting and the doctors were under extreme pressure,” Ms al-Abyad said. “The patients there were bleeding and didn’t know what to do for them.”
Less than an hour later, Ms al-Abyad gave birth to a baby boy named Ahmed. “Every five minutes there was shelling right outside the hospital, so close that mothers hid their newborns under their clothes for fear that the windows would shatter and the glass would fall on them,” she said.
“All I could think about was: How am I going to leave? How do I get home?”
Wajiha al-Abyad’s newborn son Ahmed. Source: Wajiha al-Abyad
Early the next morning, just hours after the birth, she left the hospital with her mother and newborn son. They walked the streets for over three hours before she finally managed to flag down a car. “I just prayed that we would reach our goal,” she said.
Ms. al-Abyad with her three-year-old son Taim. Source: Wajiha al-Abyad
Palestinian health authorities say more than 3,300 women and 5,000 children have been killed in Gaza since the war began. Israeli officials say the area has been under siege since Hamas led attacks in southern Israel on October 7 that killed around 1,200 people.
The bombing, massive displacement, collapse of water and electricity supplies, and limited access to food and medicine are severely affecting health care for mothers, newborns and children. About two-thirds of Gaza’s hospitals and primary care clinics are no longer functioning, according to the United Nations. For weeks, Gaza Health Ministry officials have been warning about the collapse of the health system.
“The last time I was able to check my baby’s health was a month before the war started,” said 24-year-old Noor Hammad, who is seven months pregnant. “I’m very afraid that I might lose my baby.”
Ms. Hammad worked as a nutritionist before the war broke out. She fled her home in Deir Al-Balah after her apartment was bombed and now works six hours a day as a volunteer nurse at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. Like many Palestinians in Gaza, she drinks dirty water and eats small amounts of processed canned food to survive. And she is worried about the consequences for her unborn child.
“These meals have no nutritional value for me or my baby,” she says.
After giving birth, Ms al-Abyad and her son Ahmed eventually made it back to the apartment in Deir Al-Balah, where they stayed with her mother, her three-year-old son Taim, as well as her siblings, her aunt and other cousins - about 20 in all Persons. She says Gaza is currently not a place to raise a newborn.
“We are trying to get out of Gaza in any way we can,” she said. “I want to be in a place that is safer, where there is electricity, water and food. A place where children are respected.”