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JERUSALEM – The nurse at the besieged hospital cared for five frail babies. Premature infants, the whereabouts of their parents after one month were unknown. Now he was faced with the most difficult decision of his life.
It was the height of Israel’s assault on the northern Gaza Strip last month, and al-Nasr Children’s Hospital was a war zone. The day before, air strikes had disrupted the oxygen supply to the facility in Gaza City. Israeli tanks had surrounded the hospital complex and Israeli forces called and texted doctors and asked them to leave.
But ambulances could not safely reach al-Nasr to transport the wounded, and doctors refused to leave the facility without their patients.
The five premature babies were particularly at risk. They needed oxygen and medication at regular intervals. There were no portable ventilators or incubators to transport them. Without life support, the nurse feared they would not survive an evacuation.
Then the IDF issued an ultimatum, al-Nasr director Bakr Qaoud told the Washington Post: “Get out or be bombed.” Meanwhile, an Israeli official assured that ambulances would be organized to pick up the patients.
The nurse, a Palestinian who works for the Paris-based organization Doctors Without Borders, saw no other choice. He assessed his charges and picked the strongest – the baby he thought would be most likely to endure a temporary interruption in his oxygen supply. He reluctantly left the other four on their ventilators and headed south with his wife, their children and their one baby.
“I felt like I was leaving my own children behind,” said the nurse, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his privacy. “If we had the opportunity to conquer them, we would have, [but] If we had deprived them of oxygen, they would have died.”
Two weeks later, the lull in hostilities allowed a journalist from Gaza to venture into the hospital. In the neonatal intensive care unit, Mohammed Balousha made the terrible discovery.
The decomposing bodies of the four babies. Eaten by worms. Blackened by mold. Mauled by stray dogs, Balousha said.
“A terrible and horrific scene,” he told the Post. He made a video.
The grim discovery was a reminder of the harrowing civilian casualties of Israel’s war to root out Hamas, a campaign that has spared neither hospitals nor children. Thousands were killed.
Current hostilities erupted on October 7 when Hamas and allied fighters poured out of Gaza to attack Israeli communities near the enclave, killing around 1,200 Israelis and kidnapping 240 others. Israel responded with a full siege, airstrikes and ground operations that killed more than 15,200 Palestinians, including thousands of children, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
Israel has long accused Hamas of hiding command and control centers in hospitals; The Biden administration has supported the claim. Hamas and Gaza medical personnel denied this.
Still, Israeli commanders have made the territory’s health infrastructure a focus of the military campaign. A month after the start of the war, al-Nasr was also in action.
It was Nov. 10 when Israeli forces told al-Nasr employees they had to leave, said Qaoud, the hospital director. “They sent us a map for a safe route,” he told the Post in a WhatsApp message. “They gave us half an hour to go out. Otherwise they will bomb the hospital.”
An official at the neighboring al-Rantisi Children’s Cancer Center appeared to have received assurances that ambulances would pick up patients from both al-Rantisi and al-Nasr. In a telephone conversation with the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, a branch of the Israeli Defense Ministry, the al-Rantisi official requested ambulances. In a recording of that call released by the Israel Defense Forces, a senior COGAT officer responds in Arabic: “No problem.”
The senior COGAT official tells the al-Rantisi official that he will “organize coordination” for ambulances. He indicates the exact route that medical personnel should take out of the complex.
The al-Rantisi official reminds COGAT that personnel will also evacuate al-Nasr. The COGAT officer takes note of the reminder.
Qaoud also said there was “a coordination with the Red Cross and the Israeli army that we go out and these cases will later be evacuated to another safe hospital.”
COGAT spokeswoman Shani Sasson told The Post that Israeli forces did not order al-Nasr employees to evacuate nor did they operate inside the facility. She declined to answer whether COGAT or the Israeli military had been informed about the babies or taken action to care for them.
Sarah Davies, a spokeswoman for the International Committee of the Red Cross in Jerusalem, said the agency gave no guarantees and could not safely reach the hospital.
The evacuation was painful. There was no way to reach the babies’ families, the nurse said. He had no contact information and communications were cut off across much of the Gaza Strip. Their parents were “displaced people,” he suspected, “who knew their children were in the hospital and did not believe the hospital would be hit or invaded by the occupation.”
“They thought they had left her safe.”
It was time to go. The nurse picked up the strongest baby, made sure the others’ ventilators were working and, still in his gown, walked his family out of the hospital to make the 18-mile journey, much of it on foot, south to Khan Younis to compete.
On the way, the nurse found an ambulance that was supposed to take the baby in his arms to Al-Shifa Hospital, the largest hospital in Gaza. Days later, Israeli forces would raid that facility. The World Health Organization eventually evacuated 31 premature babies from al-Shifa. By then several others had died.
On November 24, after nearly seven weeks of fighting, Israel and Hamas began a week-long pause to exchange prisoners and allow more aid to flow into Gaza.
Balousha, a journalist with the Dubai-based Al-Mashhad channel, took advantage of the relative calm to venture into Gaza City and report on bodies left behind. On Nabil Tammos Street he found two bodies, a man and a woman. Someone had covered her with a blanket.
“People [were] Tell me the strongest story is found in al-Nasr Hospital,” Balousha said. “They told me that premature babies were staying in the intensive care unit and should be saved,” but given the fighting, “no one was bringing them out.”
During the standoff, Israeli forces remained near the hospital, blocking civilian access. Undeterred, Balousha jumped “wall to wall” through destroyed buildings to reach the medical complex.
As he approached the neonatal intensive care unit, he said, he “started to smell a foul odor.” He turned on his camera.
When Al-Mashhad published the report, it erased what remained. The broadcaster provided an unaltered copy of the video to The Post, which confirmed that it was taken in al-Nasr’s pediatric intensive care unit by comparing it with images of the facility from before the war.
The remains, still on ventilators, bear little resemblance to bodies. They appear as piles of rotting flesh, made up of protruding bones and hard-to-see body parts. Dirty looking diapers remain wrapped around the middle.
Balousha described the scene on camera and rushed out of the unit.
The nurse who reviewed the video said the bodies were found where he left the babies. Nobody came for her.
Qaoud, the director of al-Nasr, said the Israeli military had been “informed that there were still cases in the hospital” but had “decided to evacuate.”
Davies, the Red Cross spokeswoman, said the organization had “received several requests to evacuate hospitals in northern Gaza, but due to this security situation we have not been involved in evacuation operations, nor have the teams committed to them.”
No one showed up to take the bodies. There was no indication, the nurse said, that the parents knew their children were dead.
He remains haunted by the event. He believes he needs psychiatric treatment.
What, he asks, were the babies’ fault?
“Were they fighters?” he asked. “Do they have weapons in their hands? Did they fire rockets?
“Why is the army resorting to oxygen and electricity? Why did the army target them?”
Heba Farouk Mahfouz contributed to this report from Cairo.