You can’t turn back the clock on genocide

 

The bombs, missiles, and the damage done

As Amal Nassar lay in pain on a bed at the Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat refugee camp in northern Gaza, the echoes of explosions and artillery fire could be heard all around her. It was mid-January and she had made her way to the embattled hospital to give birth to a baby girl she would name Mira. While Amal should have been celebrating her infant’s delivery, instead she was engulfed in fear, surrounded by the relentless nightmare of death and suffering that she and her family had experienced for months.

“I was muttering to myself, ‘I hope I die,’” she recalled.

Though gut-wrenching, Amal’s story is not unlike those of so many other young mothers in Gaza today. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 50,000 pregnant women are barely surviving there, while having babies at the rate of 180 births a day. Many of those women (especially in the north) are acutely malnourished and few received any medical attention before their labour pains began, often weeks ahead of schedule.

According to a bleak report released in March by UNICEF, the thousands of infants born in Gaza over the previous two months (and ever since) are at great risk of dying. Many already have, although numbers are hard to come by.

“There are babies who died in their mothers’ wombs and surgeries were performed to remove the dead fetuses,” said Dr. Muhammad Salha, acting director of Al-Awda Hospital, where the situation couldn’t be more dire. “Mothers are not eating because of the conditions we are living in, and this affects the infants… There are [cases] of many children suffering from dehydration and malnutrition, leading to death.”  (more...)

You can’t turn back the clock on genocide