DAILY TRIFECTA: Creating Orphans & Burying Babies
Checking-in on the IDF's unchecked brutality
TITLE: The lost babies of Gaza: ‘They are not even counted in life’
https://www.newsnationnow.com/world/war-in-israel/the-lost-babies-of-gaza/
EXCERPT: Doctors and volunteers at humanitarian organizations working in the besieged Strip say some newborn babies are dying without any formal registration of their birth due to the chaos and relentless violence in Gaza.
Ahmed, a doctor working at Al-Helal Al-Emirati Hospital in Rafah, told NewsNation in a translated message that babies delivered stillborn or those placed in a neonatal intensive care unit are no longer assigned a name.
He asked NewsNation to refer to him only by his first name due to the nature of the conflict.
Ahmed said the spread of bacteria is also causing newborn babies to die from sepsis — often caused by bacterial infections. Shortages in cleaning supplies and sanitation services are causing unsanitary environments for these newly born vulnerable babies, he said.
More than 32,000 Palestinians have been killed since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which touched off the bloodiest escalation the region has ever seen.
After more than six months more than 13,800 children have reportedly been killed, thousands have been injured and thousands more are on the brink of famine, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
This count does not capture the full magnitude of deaths, say those working in war-torn Palestine, as some of the dead lost their lives before even being counted in life.
Hiba Tibi, a country director for the aid organization CARE, told NewsNation that maternal health workers have confirmed that in some cases newborn babies are dying without record.
“Babies are born and dying before even getting registered, so they are not even counted in life,” she said. “Some of these are lives that are not even registered, they came to life and left without anything.”
As bombings and now famine are a daily reality, recording deaths — which are occurring by the minute — has become difficult for the remaining workers in Gaza who are tending to more immediate needs.
Tibi said due to a lack of medical supplies, doctors, vaccines, and other basic beginning-of-life care, giving birth is the “worst thing that can happen to a mother and a child” now because they are losing their lives from “preventable causes.”
Without birth records, these babies may be forever lost, unknown, and uncounted when it comes to time to investigate official death tolls, Taylor Seybolt, an associate professor of international affairs and director of the Ford Institute for Human Security at the University of Pittsburgh, said.
After wars, human rights organizations or government entities undertake years-long efforts to record deaths, but for Gaza, this will be even more difficult due to the massive physical destruction that has taken place, he said.
Seybolt said that part of the process of counting deaths is utilizing birth records so without them it’s almost impossible to count these children.
“Even if there is a serious effort to account for everybody, it’s unlikely that it’ll be successful,” he said, adding that it will be incredibly challenging to get an accurate tally for these unrecorded babies.
TITLE: Orphaned by an airstrike and saved from her dead mother’s womb, baby Sabreen brings hope to a Gaza family
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-hamas-war-gaza-baby-saved-womb-mother-killed-airstrike-rafah-rcna148772
EXCERPT: Sabreen Alrouh Jouda was born an orphan.
During a barrage of intense Israeli airstrikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah this weekend, one blast hit the family home into which Sabreen would have been welcomed, according to local health officials, hospital staff and family members. The blast killed her mother, Sabreen Sakani — who was 30 weeks pregnant with her at the time — as well as her father, Shukri Joudah, and her 3-year-old sister she never got to meet, Malak.
The family was declared dead at the city’s Kuwaiti Hospital on Saturday, but NBC News’ cameras captured the moment doctors were able to perform a posthumous cesarean section and rescue Sabreen from her mother’s lifeless body.
Limp and lifeless at first, the vernix-covered newborn weighing just over 3 pounds was taken in a golden fabric blanket and rushed to an upstairs room. There, doctors tried for more than two minutes to resuscitate her by pumping air into her mouth and tapping her chest. They were finally, somehow, successful.
From there, she was immediately rushed by ambulance through the night to an intensive care unit incubator at the nearby Emirati Hospital, audibly whimpering on arrival. It was there that her paternal grandmother and uncle paid her an emotional visit, accompanied by NBC News, on Monday.
“I don’t know if we should be happy that she came to life or sad,” said her uncle Rami Joudah, 25, weighing what should have been the joy of Sabreen’s arrival with the deaths of his brother and sister-in-law, who were just 29 and 27 years old. “Our lives are messy.”
The newborn’s grandmother Alham Al-Kurdi, 55, wept as she reached into the incubator.
“You are my soul, my heart. You are my heart, baby,” she said, tears rolling over her freckled cheeks, her wrinkled hand caressing the infant’s tissue-paper skin as machines chirped around her. “You are my beloved one. God willing, God willing. She is inside my heart.”
It was difficult to get a clear view of Sabreen’s tiny, preterm form through the thick plastic of the incubator keeping her alive. As she lies swaddled in tubes and wires, those lifelines provide oxygen to her underdeveloped lungs and monitor her fragile pulse. Beneath the technology keeping her alive — a rarity in Gaza where many hospitals have been destroyed by six months of war — her ribs continued to rise and fall.
Though a remarkable vignette, this family has been devastated like so many others in the enclave.
TITLE: Trapped and Starving, 2 Families in Gaza Try to Keep Their Children Alive
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/world/middleeast/gaza-famine-starvation-children.html
EXCERPT: Born before the war, Muhanned al-Najjar was not yet teething when the fighting broke out.
After his family took shelter at a school near their home in Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, Hanaa al-Najjar, his mother, said she fed Muhanned powdered formula that had originally come from the United Nations, buying it from resellers because no aid had reached her. Same for the water she needed to mix it: about 80 cents a bottle, bought on the street.
The formula ran out while Israeli forces were surrounding the area in February, so Ms. al-Najjar began feeding Muhanned bread dipped in canned beans and lentil soup distributed by aid groups. There were no freshly prepared meals, no vegetables. Day after day, it was only the cans — a diet that pediatricians warn cannot properly nourish children, who need fresh food and vitamins.
Muhanned had been a healthy baby, Ms. al-Najjar said. But, at about 20 months old, he lost his appetite. He stopped eating much. He stopped walking much. He might have drunk more water, his mother said, but the most she could give him was about two teacups a day.
In February, Israeli forces ordered the shelter evacuated. As the family left, Ms. al-Najjar said, the soldiers detained her husband. She and their four children searched for refuge without him, eventually ending up in a tent in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city. The New York Times could not verify the circumstances of her husband’s detention.
Muhanned and Ms. al-Najjar’s older son, Mohammed, 7, soon had fevers, she said, so she enlisted her husband’s brother, Jameel, to help find treatment. From hospital to hospital they went — six hours at Al-Emirati, four at Al-Awda clinic, seven at Al-Kuwaiti — before arriving at the European Gaza Hospital, where, she said, doctors told them the boys were dehydrated as well as feverish.
Mohammed seemed to improve by the time the boys were discharged after four days of receiving replacement fluids. Muhanned, however, seemed no better, refusing the bread and oranges his mother offered.
The baby’s case was “beyond difficult,” said Dr. Montaser al-Farra, a pediatrician who treated him. Muhanned weighed about 11 pounds, half of what he was supposed to, Dr. al-Farra recalled. Parts of him were oddly swollen, others skeletal, indicating a severe protein deficiency. (Ms. al-Najjar agreed to allow a video of Muhanned in this condition to be published.)
Dr. al-Farra said he was seeing many children in a similar state. “You can find malnutrition in every house and tent,” he noted.
Muhanned was so shrunken that the staff could not find a vein in his hand big enough to insert a line for the intravenous fluids. They used his leg instead.
Fading Hope
At a field hospital in Rafah in mid-March, doctors gave Muhanned al-Najjar fortified milk and a peanut-based nutritional supplement and told his mother to bring him back in a week for a checkup.
Two days later, he was able to eat some of a peanut packet and drink some milk, along with more water than usual: a good sign. Ms. al-Najjar said she left him sleeping for a few hours in her sister-in-law’s tent, where the flies would not bother him.
When she came back, she said, something seemed off. She tried to give Muhanned a little fortified milk. His small face went white.
She screamed and ran to find her brother-in-law. They tried two hospitals before doctors admitted Muhanned into the intensive care unit at the European Gaza Hospital, where he was given oxygen, she said. The staff told her to come back the next day, taking her sister-in-law’s phone number in case they needed to reach her.
When Ms. al-Najjar returned, Muhanned was dead. The hospital had called her sister-in-law with the news, but Ms. al-Najjar’s relatives had been unable to bring themselves to tell her. She was able to see her son once more before he was buried in a makeshift cemetery near the hospital.
She had not heard from her husband since his detention in February. There was no way to tell him what had happened.
“I feel lost,” she said. “My kids are at a loss not having their dad with us in this hard time.”
Amid her grief, she still had to worry about Mohammed, her 7-year-old. After another stint in the hospital, he wasn’t eating much, just like Muhanned in those last weeks. And Muhanned — he was already gone.