The only time Amira has been happy in the last year was also the scariest time. On March 5, 2024, her daughter Tuqa was born in a hospital in northern Gaza overcrowded with wounded people, where there were not enough beds, doctors or material resources to care for all the patients arriving after an Israeli bombing in a nearby area. “I only felt pain and anguish. Luckily, it was a natural birth and not by cesarean section, which requires anesthesia and a longer recovery. In less than four hours I left with my baby because they needed the bed,” she explains by phone to this newspaper from a displaced persons camp on the outskirts of Nuseirat, in central Gaza.
Some 50,000 Gazans were pregnant when Israeli bombing began on October 7, 2023, according to the UN. Pregnancy, childbirth and the first months of life of the little ones have become for these mothers a daily battle against death, hunger, cold and disease. The year that they and their babies have just experienced starkly reflects the collateral and often invisible effects of this war.
I can do absolutely nothing to improve the life of my daughter, who is growing up in the midst of bombs, shortages and destruction
Amira, Gazan mother
Amira, who does not want to give her full name or have her image published, was 24 years old and five months pregnant when the war broke out, following the attacks carried out by the Islamist movement Hamas in Israel, in which some 1,200 people died and More than 200 were forcibly taken to Gaza as hostages. She worked as a nurse at the Al Aqsa hospital, in the center of the Strip, she had just gotten married and was as happy as could be in a Gaza subject to an Israeli blockade that since 2007 has isolated and impoverished its inhabitants. This young woman has not known a Gaza open to the world and has never set foot outside this 365 square kilometer territory.
In November 2023, he had to leave his home in the Al Bureij refugee camp because Israeli bombing was approaching. Since then, he has taken shelter in three schools run by UNRWA, the UN Agency for Palestinian Refugees, and in two camps for displaced people, all in the center of the Strip. From one of them, in a worn-out tent where water already enters when it rains and where she lives with her husband, her daughter and six other relatives, she answers the questions of this newspaper. “Will it help me if this report is published?” he asks on several occasions. His answers come intermittently, depending on whether he has been able to charge his phone on a neighbor’s solar panels.
“We have been very hot in summer and now we are already cold. We got the store thanks to humanitarian aid and we have nowhere else to go. I am very afraid when I hear the sound of the bombings. I’m not well. How am I going to be okay if my daughter or I could be killed by a missile at any moment?” she asks.
Paralyzed by fear
Amira worked as a nurse at Al Aqsa Hospital until the day she gave birth. “Two weeks before leaving due to stress, but fortunately the girl had a correct weight,” he points out, explaining that one of his great fears was a premature birth and having to leave his daughter in an incubator in a territory where that there has been no electricity since October 7, 2023. Every day he conquered fear and traveled eight kilometers to get to his workplace at the hospital. She walked part way and then tried to get a vehicle to bring her closer. “They needed me at the hospital. And I wanted to continue receiving my salary, because my husband doesn’t work,” she explains.
“At one point I stopped working for 10 days because there were many bombings in the area, but one night I dreamed that a sick person needed my help to not die. I understood that I had to go back to work and, although I was already very pregnant, I returned.”
Amira describes her physical and mental exhaustion in the final stretch of pregnancy, when she could no longer eat properly, take vitamins or have her gynecological check-ups, due to the war. Added to this was the news that his house had been badly destroyed in a bombing, the death of family members, neighbors and co-workers and what he saw every day in the hospital.
“One night they bombed a place near the school where we were taking refuge. The trapped people screamed for help, but I didn’t come out. I was paralyzed by the fear that something would happen to me and I would lose my daughter. It is a memory that haunts me, one of the worst moments of this war,” he says.
In Gaza there have been an average of 5,500 births per month in the last year. Since October 2023, at least 11,000 children have also died, out of a total of more than 41,000 fatalities, according to figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health, controlled by Hamas.
I think it’s impossible to put into words what it’s like to be in a delivery room and hear pumps in the background.
Flor Francisconi, MSF
Flor Francisconi, a midwife from Doctors Without Borders (MSF), who has just spent several weeks in the Strip, explains that women risk their lives to go to a health center and give birth exhausted by the circumstances and the fear. “The truth is, I think it is impossible to express in words what it is like to be in a delivery room and hear pumps in the background,” he explains, in audio messages sent to this newspaper by the NGO.
A potato, an apple, a carrot
When Amira gave birth, the second part of this journey began: breastfeeding complicated by stress and inexperience, the difficulty of buying diapers, clothes and formula, and the fear of losing one’s life just by going to a medical center. give the girl a vaccine.
“A few days after he was born we had to return to the hospital because he had jaundice and then he suffered skin problems and some allergies due to the lack of hygiene and the situation we experienced. We have managed to give him all but one of his vaccines and he has seen a pediatrician twice, but the problem is getting to the doctors. If there is an emergency one day I don’t know how we will do it,” he explains.
According to Unicef, at least 90% of children under two years of age and 95% of pregnant women who breastfeed their babies suffer from serious food shortages in Gaza, that is, they eat little and poorly. The latest figures from the Integrated Phase Classification (ICF, in Spanish, IPC, in English), a kind of hunger thermometer in which several UN organizations participate, show that 96% of the entire population of Gaza faces high levels of food insecurity.
“Friends and relatives lent us clothes and Tuqa sleeps in an old crib. “I can do absolutely nothing to improve the life of my daughter, who is growing up in the midst of bombs, scarcity and destruction,” she laments, desperate. “If we survive, I will tell you that he was strong under the bombs from the day he was born,” he adds.
Sometimes I buy a banana, an apple, a potato, a carrot or a tomato. Just one. With the savings I have left. We always give them to her and the rest of us eat canned food.
Amira, Gazan mother
Mercè Rocaspana, medical manager of the MSF-Spain emergency unit, admits that humanitarian organizations tend to focus on the emergency, “on the direct victims of the conflict, and pregnant women, babies and the chronically ill are left behind.” sometimes in the background.” “But maternal and child health must be a priority in Gaza,” he insists.
Amira spends her days trying to create a fictitious sense of well-being for her daughter and goes around the markets and humanitarian aid distribution sites looking for powdered milk with cereals and some fruits and vegetables, because the little girl has already started eating solid foods. “Sometimes I buy a banana, an apple, a potato, a carrot or a tomato. Just one. With the savings I have left. We always give them to her and the rest of us eat canned food,” he explains.
According to the UN, at least 50,000 children in the Strip need treatment to treat acute malnutrition that can have, for example, permanent effects on their cognitive development. The humanitarian situation in the north is especially serious because little humanitarian aid manages to reach there. “Child malnutrition was practically non-existent in Gaza a year ago and people are lost, they don’t know how to alleviate it, especially in this context,” explains Rocaspana.
This year, NGOs such as MSF have tried to continue offering prenatal and postnatal check-ups in Gaza, information on sexual and reproductive health and breastfeeding support, which is of greater importance to avoid malnutrition in newborns, which is more difficult to identify. and to treat that of children who are more than six months old. “In Gaza before the war, exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life was not at high levels, but you could get powdered milk and quality water to make a bottle. Now, the water is in bad condition and the risks are enormous,” explains Rocaspana, from MSF, explaining that the NGO is trying to get special liquid milk for newborns into Gaza.
Amira is exhausted and explains that she cannot project herself into the future because, even if the war were to stop today, it will be very difficult to rebuild their lives and homes in Gaza. “I don’t know, really, if I will ever be able to go back to who I was,” he says goodbye.
