Gaza: Palestinian child rescued from dying womb dies after Israeli strike

The miracle ultimately did not happen. A Palestinian baby recently rescued from the womb of his dying mother after an Israeli bombing has died at Rafah Hospital in the southern Gaza Strip, his uncle told AFP this Friday.

The Emirates hospital in Rafah, where the premature baby was admitted, said in a press release that Sabreen al-Ruh, as her uncle called her, died on Thursday, without providing further details.

“I received a call from (…) the Emirati hospital in Rafah saying that her condition had deteriorated, that they could not save her and that she had returned to her family,” killed in an explosion that hit the town of the family home east of Rafah about a week ago. said the child’s uncle Rami al-Sheikh.

He said he went to pick up the body from the hospital on Friday. “I opened the grave of his father Shukri and buried him there in the Auni Daher cemetery in Rafah,” he said.

Nineteen people killed

“It was written by the will of Allah that Ruh, the daughter of Sabrina al-Sakani, was to join her family in eternity, despite the efforts of the Emirates Red Crescent Hospital neonatal team to save her on Thursday,” he said. the hospital wrote in a statement released Friday.

Sabreen al-Sakani arrived at the hospital dying, with serious injuries to her head and abdomen and difficulty breathing, a surgeon explained to AFP. When examining the woman, doctors discovered that she was pregnant and decided to remove the fetus by caesarean section. His mother died minutes later, and the baby’s father and sister arrived at the hospital dead.

The attack on that house killed at least 19 people, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

Rafah is home to about 1.5 million people, including more than a million people displaced by more than six months of bombing and fighting in the Gaza Strip (2.4 million inhabitants), according to the UN. Israel claims that the last Hamas battalions are grouped in Rafah and says it wants to launch an offensive there to destroy them.

Hamas carried out an unprecedented attack in southern Israel on October 7, killing 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP report based on official Israeli figures.

In response, Israel vowed to destroy the Palestinian Islamist movement, which has held power in Gaza since 2007, and launched an offensive that has so far killed 34,356 people, mostly civilians, according to the Hamas Health Ministry.