The confluence of constant bombings, lack of medical care, malnutrition and the impossibility of maintaining basic hygiene make up a grim Gazan reality for pregnant women and new mothers, in a war long past its ninth month
Haaretz
‘My baby was forced to wean,’ says Reham (not her real name), a 21-year-old mother originally from northern Gaza’s Gaza City. Unable to breastfeed her 10-month-old son due to her own malnourishment, she says caring for him under constant threat has felt exhausting.
Reham and her husband were displaced to the south when she was seven months pregnant. ‘We had to flee right in the middle of the bombing. It was terrifying.’ The fear even ‘triggered premature labor symptoms,’ she recounts, and on December 29 she hurried to the hospital.
She found it ‘so overcrowded that there wasn’t even an available bed in the delivery room for me.’ After finally securing one, she went into labor with limited medical supervision. ‘I was in labor for over 14 hours. They wouldn’t give me any assistance, expecting me to dilate on my own. But I needed a doctor to supervise my case,’ she says.
For Reham, unhygienic conditions at the hospital compounded the already horrendous circumstances. ‘A woman would give birth, and then you’d have to lie on that same bed, with her blood and sweat still on it,’ she recalls. ‘There were no pads or any way to clean up after giving birth.’ Basic hygiene was ‘nonexistent.’
But the most difficult part was the isolation. ‘I had my baby on my own,’ she says. ‘My mother was still in Gaza City, my mother-in-law wasn’t allowed to stay in the hospital due to the heavy bombardment,’ and her husband was also not present. ‘I was there completely alone.’
When asked when she was discharged from the hospital, Reham laughs. ‘A few minutes after giving birth. They were way over capacity and desperately needed beds.’
According to the World Health Organization, as of September, 17 hospitals in Gaza are partially functioning, out of a total of 36 hospitals across the Strip.
According to pre-war data, Gaza has the second-highest birthrate in the Middle East (after the West Bank) with women giving birth on average to 3.26 children; 38.8 percent of the population is under 14 years of age. Maternal and infant mortality rates were relatively low.
With the collapse of the health-care system and the war in its second year, women are continuing to give birth and care for newborns in an ever-worsening humanitarian crisis. Some 84 percent of Gazans have been displaced, according to the United Nations, many of them to tents and overcrowded shelters that lack basic facilities.
‘I just woke up one day with responsibilities I never imagined I’d have to face alone,’ says Reham. ‘If I’d had him in a time without war, I wouldn’t have felt that he’s a burden.’
After giving birth, Reham returned to ‘an overcrowded tent,’ where she lived with her husband and his family.
‘There was no privacy there and it was far from a healing environment,’ she says. Finding basic products like tampons, pads and other care items was a struggle. When she did succeed, they were prohibitively expensive. ‘When my husband bought a pack of pads, it felt like a celebratory evening,’ she notes.
‘Sometimes,’ Reham confides about her son, ‘I wish I hadn’t had him. Sometimes it feels like it’s all too much – it overwhelms me.’
She lives with the fear that her loved ones could be taken away at any moment. ‘You have to come to terms with the possibility that any second there might be ‘fire belts,” referring to intense bombardment of a concentrated area, ‘or a ground invasion, and you might lose your husband or child.’
‘I just woke up one day with responsibilities I never imagined I’d have to face alone,’ without the support of family. ‘If I’d had him in a time without war, I wouldn’t have felt that he’s a burden.’
But when Reham first found out she was pregnant, before the war, she was hopeful. ‘It was an amazing feeling, like no other,’ she recalls. ‘I was buying all the clothes and toys a child needs’ and ‘deciding which hospital I wanted to give birth in.’
I never imagined I’d be in a situation like this. I’m living everything for the first time, in the worst conditions.
But when the war broke out, Reham’s choices dwindled dramatically. Her house was struck on October 13 and she says she grew ‘incredibly anxious about how and where I would give birth.’
After delivering her son, returning to the tent she was living in provided little comfort. Unable to take a shower, she was forced to boil water to bathe in. But ‘the smoke was suffocating’ and, days later, Reham began to experience shortness of breath due to smoke exposure and the cold weather. ‘To this day, I still suffer from shortness of breath and back pain’ from the cold, she says.
Her infant son developed a fungal skin infection, which could not be treated after the doctor ‘prescribed a treatment that isn’t even available.’
Reham also suffered from postpartum depression. ‘I never imagined I’d be in a situation like this,’ she says. ‘I’m living everything for the first time, in the worst conditions.’
Developmental milestones were marked by the war too. Her son’s first words were uttered as they were displaced for the third time, she relays. ‘He said ‘baba’ [dad in English] as we were fleeing.’
‘Dying in slow motion’
Kholoud (not her real name), from Khan Yunis, found out she was pregnant on her birthday in April 2023.
‘Having a life growing inside you, knowing that you’re building a future with your partner, is an extraordinary feeling,’ she says.
But just a few months later, that feeling was replaced by fear as the war intensified. Being pregnant and with a 3-year-old son, ‘anxiety completely took over.’ She was left feeling ‘like a crazy person who didn’t know how to act.’
Like many others in Gaza, Kholoud initially thought the conflict would be another brief assault, the kind that typically lasts a month. But as days turned into months, and now more than a year, ‘we’re literally living a genocide,’ she says.
Even the early days of the war felt like ‘dying in slow motion,’ Kholoud says. On October 17, she recalls ‘I was packing our bags [to evacuate], and I had an argument with my husband because I still didn’t want to leave our home. I was waiting in the car with my son when our house was struck,’ with her husband still inside. ‘I remember waking up in the hospital with my husband standing beside me, reassuring me that no one had been harmed.’
Two weeks after their displacement to her in-laws’ house in Nuseirat refugee camp, Kholoud was preparing lunch for her family. ‘I remember standing in the doorway, calling for my husband to bring our son inside,’ she says. Suddenly, heavy bombardment targeted the neighborhood. ‘It was a massacre,’ Kholoud recounts. ‘I was thrown into the air and slammed against a wall from the force of the explosion.’
When she woke up in the hospital, doctors told her that she had escaped with only a minor head injury. But her relief quickly turned to fear when she learned her husband was in critical condition in the emergency room. ‘I went back home that day, not knowing I had lost the baby inside me and unaware of how serious my husband’s condition was.’
I was thrown into the air and slammed against a wall from the force of the explosion.
Kholoud experienced heavy bleeding and discomfort in her stomach the next day. ‘I rushed to the hospital, where they informed me that Ous, my unborn child, had been martyred.’
With her husband still in the hospital, Kholoud says she was engulfed by grief. ‘All I wished for was for us all to die together,’ she says. ‘Me, my husband and Gaith, my firstborn – I wanted us to die as a family.’
Kholoud says her husband eventually recovered and was released from the hospital. But he chose not to speak about their loss: ‘It didn’t sit well with him to have his friends comfort him about losing his unborn child’ with so much having been lost since the beginning of the war.
Despite their grief, Kholoud and her husband decided to help others by giving away the baby clothes. But there are some items Kholoud refused to part with. These include her husband’s baby clothes, which Gaith once wore. ‘Ous can’t wear them now, but my next child will.’
Asked if she plans to become pregnant again, Kholoud responds: ‘Life has to go on; there are endless possibilities.
‘I don’t want Gaith to grow up alone,’ she adds. ‘He deserves a sister or brother.’