Israel-Gaza: Baby Saved From Dead Mother’s Womb After Israeli Strike

Sabreen was dead before she could look into the baby’s eyes or hold her.

The young mother had carried her child through seven-and-a-half months of pregnancy. They were days and nights of constant fear, but Sabreen hoped the family’s luck would hold until the war ended.

That luck vanished in the roar and fire of an explosion in the hour before midnight on 20 April.

The Israelis dropped a bomb onto the al-Sakani family home in Rafah where Sabreen, along with her husband and the couple’s other daughter – three-year-old Malak – were asleep.

Sabreen suffered extensive injuries and her husband and Malak were killed, but the baby was still alive in her mother’s womb when rescue workers reached the site.

They rushed Sabreen to hospital, where doctors performed an emergency Caesarean section to deliver the child.

The baby girl has now been placed in an incubator
Sabreen could not be saved but doctors worked to resuscitate the baby, gently tapping her chest to stimulate breathing. Air was pumped into her lungs.

“She was born in severe respiratory distress,” said Dr Mohammed Salama, head of the emergency neo-natal unit at Emirati Hospital in Rafah.

But the baby – who weighed just 1.4kg (3.1 lbs) – survived the ordeal of her birth.

The doctor wrote the words “the baby of the martyr Sabreen al-Sakani” on a piece of tape and attached it to her body. She was then placed in an incubator.

“We can say there is some progress in her health condition,” Dr Salama said.

“But the situation is still at risk. This respiratory distress syndrome is originally caused by premature birth. This child should have been in the mother’s womb at this time, but she was deprived of this right.”

The doctor expects her to remain in hospital for up to a month.

After that we will see about her leaving…here is the biggest tragedy. Even if this child survives, she was born an orphan,” Dr Salama said.

There were no parents left to name the baby. Her dead sister Malak had wanted her to be called Rouh, which means soul or spirit in Arabic. But she has been called Sabreen, in memory of her mother.

Surviving family members gathered at the hospital, caught between the practicalities of creating a new family life for orphaned baby Sabreen and their grief and anger.

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

BBC