Most of the Gazan population, as well as their pregnant women, have been displaced in recent weeks by the Israeli military offensive on southern Rafah area, now overcrowded and where expectant mothers face deadly risks. It is estimated that in the Strip there are some 5,500 women pregnant women who will give birth in the next month, according to data from the United Nations Population Fund, which is equivalent to about 180 births a day in minimal hygiene and safety conditions.

In Rafah, whose population has increased by 400% to reach 1.5 million people, the majority displaced and overcrowded in medical centers, schools and plastic tents, the Emirati Maternity Hospital is the only center to help the pregnant women. But it is on the verge of collapse. “The Emirati Hospital is now attending three times as many births as before the war,” the emergency coordinator of the NGO Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in Gaza, Pascale Coissard, said in a statement this Wednesday.

“All places are overcrowded, with people living in tentsschools and hospitals,” he explained. For this reason, only the most urgent and life-threatening births are being attended to, MSF said today, whose staff say they have witnessed parturients giving birth “in plastic tents and public bathrooms.” among them, women who have lost their newborns.

Children, the main victims

“Children need care and attention. They need milk, diapers (…) They are innocent children; They have nothing to do with the war,” recalls Mona Dernouna, who recently gave birth at the Emirati Hospital in Rafah, after being displaced from the city of Jabalia, in the north, and taking shelter for days in a school.

The Israeli Army has maintained its military offensive in the southern area of ​​the enclave for weeks. There, other hospitals such as Al Amal, in Khan Younis, It has been surrounded by attacks and artillery fire for ten dayscausing the death this Wednesday of a security official, and in the last 48 hours, of at least four displaced people, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent (PRCS, for its acronym in English).

The Nasser Hospital, also in Khan Younis, has been under military siege for two weeksPRCS, the main organization in charge of the rescue and transfer of the wounded in Gaza, denounced this Wednesday, which makes 100 members of the medical staff and some 7,000 displaced people live in “terror,” most of them children and women.