“It is a miracle that she was still alive despite her breathing difficulties,” Sahib al-Shams, director of the Kuwaiti Hospital in Rafah, told AFP. The newborn was in stable condition, hospital officials said Tuesday.
The mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, died 10 minutes following the operation, al-Shams said. She was seven months pregnant when she arrived at the hospital with injuries to her head and stomach. The doctors noticed the pregnancy during the examination and decided to immediately perform a cesarean section despite the lack of anesthesia.
Image: (APA/AFP/MOHAMMED ABED)
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Image: (APA/AFP/MOHAMMED ABED)
The newborn was taken to the children’s clinic at the Emirati Hospital, which was set up in Rafah in December. There the baby was placed in an incubator and given oxygen and antibiotics, a hospital representative told AFP. Sabreen al-Sakani was injured in an air strike in the Gaza Strip that also killed the baby’s father and sister.
The war between Israel and the radical Islamic Hamas in the Palestinian territory was triggered by Hamas’s unprecedented attack on Israel on October 7th. Fighters from Hamas, which is classified as a terrorist organization by the EU and the USA, and other militant Palestinian groups entered Israeli towns and committed atrocities once morest civilians. According to Israeli information, they killed around 1,170 people and kidnapped around 250 people as hostages to the Gaza Strip.
Since then, Israel has taken massive military action in the Gaza Strip. According to the Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health, which cannot be independently verified, more than 34,100 people have been killed so far.