Newborn
Infants Die Without Necessary Medical Care in Gaza’s Overwhelmed Shifa Hospital
Two weeks of
conflict made crossing borders too difficult to arrange in time. They may have
had a chance if they had gotten out.
The conflict has
only made things worse, with patients displaced from other parts of Gaza
streaming into Shifa and placing a huge burden on medical staff. There are only
sixteen incubators in the intensive care unit of the neonatal ward. Equipment
is in need of repair and there are frequent power cuts due in large part to the
seven-year siege of Gaza by Israel and Egypt.
None of this
matters to Rami who, like so many thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, must now
mourn. His newborn twins spent their brief lives facing each other. He will
bury them still attached.
Rami says he will
wait until he gets home to tell Najwa. “She will be sad, but she is stronger
than me,” he says. He is concerned that she cannot get pregnant again after the
C-section. The doctor assures him she was not affected.
Amna does not
know how she will tell the five girls. “They were so excited,” she says. “They
kept asking ‘Where are our brothers?’ What am I going to tell them?”
Rami says, “It
was fate.”
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