In the halls of Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, a heavy silence reigns, interrupted occasionally by the moans of mothers and the intermittent sound of respirators. On a worn plastic chair, Reem Abdullah sat staring at a pink blanket she had prepared for her unborn baby, but the journey ended before it even began.
“I was counting the days until I could hold her, but hunger and fear snatched her away from me,” Reem told Al Jazeera Net. She had been displaced from the Shuja’iyya neighborhood east of Gaza City weeks earlier after losing her home in a heavy bombardment. She arrived in Khan Yunis exhausted, without food or medicine, only to discover that her fetus had stopped moving days before its due date.
A few steps away, Doaa al-Masry leaned against a wall near the door of the maternity ward. She was still wearing her green surgical gown, having lost her premature baby just minutes after his birth. She told Al Jazeera Net, “He was born alive, but he didn’t find any milk or a fully functioning incubator. The power went out twice during the birth, and we couldn’t save him.”
Inside the maternity ward, doctors race against time in conditions that suggest a complete collapse. The operating room lacks sterilization, and equipment is shared by multiple patients simultaneously. In one corner, a nurse tries to comfort another mother who had just lost her twins before they were born. Her wailing is intertwined with the whistling of the respirators, which fails to drown out the sounds of the shelling. It’s as if the hospital is a war zone without artillery.
These scenes are a recurring reality in the Nasser Hospital. In just 24 hours, 13 newborn deaths were recorded, including 10 fetuses who lost their lives in their mothers’ wombs before they were even born, and three premature infants who died in incubators after a brief struggle with nearly broken respirators.
