From Gaza, a harrowing account of life in the midst of death emerged this week when a baby girl was delivered from the womb of her already deceased mother . Doctors wrote the words “the baby of the martyr Sabreen al-Sakani”, on a piece of tape and attached it to the infant before placing her in an incubator. The little girl, also called Sabreen, was in severe respiratory distress and weighed just 1.
4kg when medics delivered her through a C-section. They could not save her mother, who was 30 weeks pregnant, when an Israeli attack in Rafah ripped through the family home, killing her husband and their other daughter. With no prospect of a ceasefire in the immediate term, and Israel determined to launch a ground offensive in the southernmost city of Rafah, 17,000 orphaned children face a precarious future.
“Here is the biggest tragedy,” said Dr Mohammed Salama, head of the emergency neo-natal unit at Emirati Hospital where she was born. Even if this child survives, she was born an orphan. WCNSF — ‘Wounded child, no surviving family’ — is a bleak new abbreviation coined by hospital staff to identify patients over the past seven months.
Yesterday, after five days it was confirmed baby Sabreen, born to a dead mother, had lost her own battle for survival. As society collapses across the Palestinian enclave, women and girls are facing bombardment, starvation, violence, coercion, sexual assault, and death. Women and children always disproportionately bear the brunt of c.
