Mohamed Kullab, with his small clenched fists and dark eyes, was born a few days ago, weeks after the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
“One should not be born in these circumstances,” tells his mother, Fadwa Kullab, who left her home in Rafah to settle with her family in a school in the UN in this city in the south of the Palestinian territory.
They seek to escape the attacks of the Israeli army that bombards the Palestinian territory since the Islamist movement Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, killing more than 1,200 people, the vast majority civilians, according to authorities.
“His birth was the most difficult experience of my life,” details the mother, who declares herself defenseless and incapable of protecting her children.
More than 11,200 people, mostly civilians, including more than 4,500 children, have been killed in Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip since the start of the war, according to the Hamas government in power in Gaza.
Several premature babies died in recent days due to lack of electricity in hospitals in the north of the territory, the part most affected by the fighting.
Like several mothers of newborns interviewed in Gaza, Mohamed’s mother claims that he refuses to be breastfed. “He doesn’t eat well”she admits, even though she breastfed “to all his children.”
Breastfeeding women must drink approximately three liters of water a day and increase their food rations to produce breast milk, but access to clean water and food is increasingly difficult in Gaza.
Kullab emphasizes that it is also difficult for him to find formula and diapers.
Lack of material for deliveries and newborns
Najwa Salem, 37, holds her second child wrapped in several thick blankets. The infant has jaundice, but in Gaza more than half of the hospitals are out of service and the others do not have enough fuel to carry out phototherapy sessions.
To minimize the risk of neurological damage, he must be exposed to daylight, but his mother hesitates because of the “garbage piling up and bombings.”
In a school classroom in Rafah, where she now lives with 70 other people, she worries that the scar from her cesarean section will become infected.
The hospital where she gave birth forced her to leave after one night “because they had too many wounded to heal”he indicates.
Dust, omnipresent after the bombings, is another threat, especially for premature children who suffer from breathing difficulties.
Um Ibrahim Alayan, eight months pregnant, has been coughing, like the rest of her family, since she fled her neighborhood under airstrikes.
His coughing spells could have caused the premature contractions he has been suffering for a few days.
Her hands move from her belly to her exhausted face and she ends up sobbing. “I’m terrified. I just want to hug my baby. I feel like I could lose him at any moment.”it states.
In the coastal strip, 50,000 women are pregnant and more than 180 give birth every day without having “where to go”says Dominic Allen, representative of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in the Palestinian territories.
“We estimate that at least 15% of births will involve complications requiring obstetric care,” not available in Gaza at war, he points out.
UNFPA managed to introduce 8,000 “hygiene kits for childbirth” that contain an element to cut the umbilical cord, a blanket to warm the newborn and disposable sheets.
A drop of water in the ocean of the needs of the 2.4 million inhabitants of Gaza and especially of the pregnant women sometimes forced to give birth in makeshift camps or on the road.
Source: AFP
Source: Gestion
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