A premature Palestinian baby rescued from her mother’s womb shortly after the woman was killed in an Israeli airstrike has died, the baby’s uncle has said.
Sabreen Jouda died in a Gaza hospital on Thursday after her health deteriorated and medical teams were unable to save her, Rami al-Sheikh said on Friday.
Sabreen’s home in the southern Gaza city of Rafah was hit by an Israeli airstrike shortly before midnight on Saturday. Her parents and four-year-old sister were killed.
First responders took the bodies to a nearby hospital where medical workers performed an emergency caesarean section on her mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, who was 30 weeks pregnant. The infant was kept in an incubator in a neonatal intensive care unit at another hospital until she died five days later.
Sheikh told the Associated Press that Sabreen was buried on Thursday next to her father.
“We were attached to this baby in a crazy way,” he said, speaking near Sabreen’s grave in a cemetery in Rafah. “God had taken something from us but given us something in return,” with the baby surviving after her family died, he said. “But [now] he has taken them all. My brother’s family is completely wiped out. It’s been deleted from the civil registry. There is no trace of him left behind.”
More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed during the Israel-Hamas war, according to local health officials, who say about two-thirds of the dead are women and children. The health officials do not differentiate between combatants and civilians in their count.
Israel declared war on Hamas and unleashed an air and ground offensive in Gaza in response to an attack by militants on 7 October in southern Israel. The militants killed about 1,200 people in Israel and took another 250 hostage.
More than half of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents have sought refuge in Rafah, where Israel has conducted near-daily raids as it prepares for a possible offensive in the city.
