Gaza baby taken alive from dead mother’s womb after Israeli attack | World

Sabreen died before she could look her baby in the eyes or hug her.

The young mother carried her daughter in her womb for seven and a half months. There were days and nights of constant fear, but Sabreen hoped the family’s fortunes would hold until the end of the war in Gaza.

That hope has disappeared with the boom and fire of an explosion an hour before midnight on April 20th.

Israelis threw a bomb at the Al Sakani family home in Rafah, where Sabreen, her husband and the couple’s 3-year-old daughter Malak slept.

Her husband and Malak died instantly, while Sabreen was seriously injured, but the baby was still alive in her womb when the rescue team arrived at the scene.

They took the woman to the hospital, where doctors performed an emergency cesarean section for the girl’s birth.

Sabreen couldn’t be saved, but doctors worked to resuscitate the baby, gently pressing your chest to stimulate breathing and pumping air into your lungs. “She was born with severe respiratory problems,” said Dr. Mohammed Salama, head of the emergency neonatal unit at Emirati Hospital in Rafah.

The baby, who weighed just 1.4 kilograms, survived the ordeal of birth.

The doctor wrote the words “Baby of the martyr Sabreen al Sakani” on a piece of tape and attached it to her body. So they put her in an incubator. “We can say there is some progress in his health,” Salama said.

“But the situation is still risky. This respiratory distress syndrome is originally caused by premature birth. This girl should be in her mother’s womb right now, but she was deprived of that right.”

The doctor believes she will be in the hospital for a month. “After that, we’ll see if she can leave. (…) Here’s the biggest tragedy: Even if this girl survives, she was born an orphan”, said Salama.

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His parents were no longer around to give him a name. Her late sister, Malak, wanted the baby to be named Rouh, which means soul or spirit in Arabic. But they named her Sabreen, after her mother.

You surviving relatives gathered at the hospitalinvolved in the practical aspects of building a new family life for the orphaned baby, while dealing with pain and anger.

The baby’s maternal grandmother, Mirvat al Sakani, spoke of the “injustice and slander” of what happened to people who “had nothing to do with anything”.

“My son was also with them. He was dismembered and they still haven’t found him. They don’t recognize him (…). Why are they attacking them? We don’t know why, how. We don’t know, I don’t know (…). They they only attack women and children”, he said.

“An entire family erased from the civil registry and the only survivor is a girl? And what was their fault?” asked Rami al Sheikh, the baby’s uncle. “They were ordinary civilians,” he added.

A Sabreen’s paternal grandmother, Ahalam al Kurdi, promised to raise the girl. “She is my love, my soul. She is a memory of her father. I will take care of her.”

The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health says that of the 34,000 dead in Gaza since the start of the war, at least two-thirds are women and children.

Israel launched its offensive after about 1,200 Israelis and foreigners – most of them civilians – were killed and another 253 taken hostage in Gaza in an attack by Hamas militants on October 7, according to an Israeli count.

O Israeli army insists it does not attack civilians and accused Hamas of using the population as a human shield.

Israeli airstrikes on Rafah on the night of April 20 also killed 15 children from the extended Al Aal family. The father of several of the children, Abed Al Aal, said his identity was erased because all of his children and his wife were killed.

“Show me a man among them. They are all children and women“, he said.

An Israeli military statement sent to the BBC after the attacks said: “At one point, the IDF [Forças de Defesa de Israel] attacked several military targets of terrorist organizations in Gaza, including military compounds, launch sites and armed terrorists.”

There are now around 1.4 million people in Rafah, who were told by the IDF to move south for safety at the start of the war.

But speculation has grown in recent days that Israeli forces will soon enter Rafah to continue the fight against Hamas.

The United States has called on Israel to adopt a selective strategy rather than launch a full-scale invasion of Rafah, which could herald an even more serious humanitarian crisis in the region.