On the 10th day of the war, Safa Abed learned she was pregnant, and cried. When she told her husband, he said this was no time to have a child, but they would manage, somehow. They had fled their home in Gaza City when Israel declared war on Hamas, the militant group that controlled Gaza and which had launched a surprise attack on Israel last October, killing some 1,200 people. An Israeli rocket tore through the Abeds’ apartment building soon after. Abed, her husband, and three-year-old son took refuge with extended family in central Gaza, with 19 people sharing one apartment. She prayed the war would end before she gave birth.
For months, Abed, 29, could not find a doctor or midwife for her prenatal appointments because so many hospitals in Gaza were bombed out or closed. So she turned to her mother for advice; she fretted that she wasn’t getting the prenatal vitamins or nutrition she needed. The family lived on canned beans and the occasional vegetable. There was no fruit, meat, or fish. She fainted multiple times due to the poor diet and vomited from contaminated water.
Anytime Abed imagined her baby’s future, she panicked, worrying about what would happen if she couldn’t breastfeed and formula wasn’t available, or if she was killed and her baby orphaned, as by the spring 19,000 children would be. Her young son had lived through multiple conflicts with Israel, but “these were like escalations, they were not wars,” she said. “I just don’t want to see my baby suffering the way people are suffering here.” She dreamed of giving birth in peacetime, when she could provide her child with mangos, cucumbers, and bananas.
By summer, the death toll of the war was staggering; the medical journal The Lancet estimating that in July 2024 between seven and nine percent of the population of the Gaza Strip had been wiped out. Some half of all deaths were women and children.
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