Premature babies are evacuated from the controversial hospital in Gaza
Thirty-one premature babies in extremely critical condition were evacuated on Sunday from the controversial Al-Shifa hospital in northern Gaza and taken to another hospital in the south of the enclave, the Palestinian Red Crescent and the World Health Organization. said on social media.
Emergency medical workers from the Red Crescent and the WHO, a United Nations agency, took the babies by ambulance to Al-Helal Emirati Maternity Hospital in Rafah, where they received emergency care.
The babies’ conditions had “deteriorated rapidly”, according to UNICEF, which said it had taken part in the “extremely dangerous” evacuation effort. It said the babies were transferred to Al-Helal in temperature-controlled incubators, where they were stabilized and cared for in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit.
Officials in Gaza and Egypt have said the babies will be transported across the border to Egypt for treatment, although the timing was unclear. On Sunday, Gaza’s Health Ministry published a list of the 31 evacuated babies and called on their families to go to the hospital to identify them, adding that the parents might join the babies in Egypt. UNICEF said it helped identify and register the babies to help with family reunification.
WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, posted photo on X, formerly Twitter, about an employee wearing a blue UN helmet and bulletproof vest scooping up a small child. The babies, along with six health care workers and 10 family members of hospital staff, were evacuated “under extremely intense and risky security conditions,” he wrote.
As Israel’s efforts to seize Al-Shifa Hospital in recent days set off a fight for survival, doctors and health officials warned that nearly 40 premature babies in incubators in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit were at particular risk of dying. passing away. Some of them were born to mothers killed in airstrikes or who died shortly after giving birth, Al-Shifa doctors said. Some were the only survivors in their families.
Medical workers placed the babies together on beds and hopes for the best as fuel for the incubators — as well as dialysis machines, ventilators and other life-saving equipment — dwindled.
At least 40 patients, including at least four premature babies, have died in Al-Shifa since November 11 due to power outages, the United Nations said on Saturday, citing hospital officials.
Fighting has been going on at and around Al-Shifa for over a week. More than 2,500 civilians, patients and staff left the facility on Saturday after receiving an evacuation order from the Israeli army, the WHO said in a statement. The agency called the hospital a “death zone.”
But WHO and health officials in the south have warned that hospitals there are already stretched far too thin to accommodate new patients being evacuated from Al-Shifa and other hospitals in the north.
Al-Helal, the maternity hospital where the premature babies were admitted on Sunday, posted a message video from the neonatal intensive care unit a day earlier in which an unnamed doctor said that Al-Helal would also run out of fuel on Monday.
For premature babies, “this is a death sentence carried out the moment the electricity is turned off,” the doctor says.
Israel has been reluctant to supply fuel to Gaza for fear it would be used by Hamas, the Palestinian group that controls Gaza, in its war with Israel. Israel recently began allowing small amounts of fuel into the strip, but the UN and aid agencies say this is far too little to tackle the growing humanitarian crisis there.
Iyad Abuheweila And Abu Bakr Bashir reporting contributed.