The New Arab reports:

Around 60,000 pregnant women in Gaza are living in fear of the fate of their unborn children as Israel’s genocidal war and its deliberately created famine spares no one.

Yasmin Abdulrahman fled to southern Gaza in March just days after the death of her newborn baby, who lived only 11 days before succumbing to malnutrition.

He had been born after four months of near-famine conditions across the Strip. Yasmin recalls that she spent over 30 hours without food at one point in February, even though she was in her last month of pregnancy and needed extra and specialised nutrition for her baby.

At birth, Abdulrahman was just 1.2 kg (around 2.6 lb) and was severely dehydrated, so he had to stay under intensive monitoring in the neonatal department at the Kamal Adwan Hospital in north Gaza.

However, tragically, he died after a week.

“The doctors said there was no milk, no solutions, hardly any medicines he needed,” Yasmin is crying as she explains. “My son wasn’t the only one – I saw many newborn babies in a similar state. Some died when he did, others before.”

Thirty children have died in the hospitals in north Gaza, including 23 in Kamal Adwan. Half of them were newborns. Ten others had starved to death in the central and southern regions of the Strip by April, according to health ministry spokesperson Ashraf al-Qudra, who says what’s documented doesn’t reflect the whole picture, due to the difficulty taking a proper register of the deaths as many newborns have died at home and in other situations. [Continue reading…]