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Anas Baba for NPR
RAFAH, the Gaza Strip — For days, Nour Al-Banna did not know if her infants have been useless or alive.
On Oct. 4, Al-Banna gave beginning to twin women — her first youngsters — and named them Leen and Bayan. They have been born prematurely and wanted additional care. In order that they have been transferred to Gaza Metropolis’s Al-Shifa Hospital, a contemporary facility with a fleet of incubators for newborns.
Al-Banna and her husband visited typically. The ladies have been getting stronger.
“They reached a stage the place they have been being educated to nurse,” Al-Banna tells NPR. “Then the conflict occurred.”
On Oct. 7, Hamas militants crossed from Gaza into Israel, killing some 1,200 folks and taking about 240 others hostage, in accordance with the Israeli authorities. Israel responded with airstrikes and a floor invasion into Gaza that has killed greater than 12,700 folks, in accordance with Palestinian well being officers.
Al-Shifa Hospital full of hundreds of conflict wounded and evacuees. There was preventing very near the hospital. Israel accuses Hamas of operating a command heart in tunnels underneath the hospital, and of utilizing docs and sufferers as human shields.
It wasn’t protected for Al-Banna and her husband to go to. At first, they have been in a position to name the nurses and examine on their daughters’ standing by telephone. However then 4G, telephones and web went down. And underneath an Israeli blockade, the hospital ran out of gasoline to energy its turbines.
Al-Banna’s twins have been amongst tons of of sufferers whose lifesaving machines — incubators and ventilators — turned off when Al-Shifa’s electrical energy went out. Docs crowded all of the newborns onto hospital beds collectively, to maintain them heat. However Gaza’s Well being Ministry says eight of the newborns died.
And on Nov. 12, the World Well being Group stated Al-Shifa ceased to operate as a hospital.
“I stored considering, ‘God is aware of if they’re useless or alive,'” Al-Banna recollects.
Often, telephone alerts would come again, and Al-Banna says her husband managed to get a nurse to ship a video of the infants that have been nonetheless alive.
Al-Banna says she was relieved to acknowledge one in every of her daughters from a birthmark. Then she discovered their names on an inventory revealed by Palestinian well being officers of infants being transferred to Egypt.
The ladies have been amongst some 31 newborns evacuated Sunday from Al-Shifa Hospital by medics from the Palestinian Crimson Crescent and the World Well being Group. They have been transported in ambulances to the Emirates Hospital in Rafah, the place 28 of them were deemed sick enough to qualify to cross into Egypt — to security, and to obtain the care they wanted.
“They weren’t taken out a minute too quickly,” says Dr. Margaret Harris, a WHO spokesperson. “It had been very troublesome for the employees to provide them enough vitamin, and hold them heat. Not one of the infants had mother and father with them, so that they did not have entry to any breast milk.”
On Monday, Al-Banna was reunited together with her daughters at Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt. The mom sat at the back of an ambulance together with her daughters, who have been sporting blue fleece hats, bundled underneath blankets, all making the journey to Egypt collectively.
Later, they have been flown from the Egyptian aspect of the Gaza border to the capital Cairo for additional care, Harris says.
Within the ambulance at Rafah with Al-Banna and her two daughters have been 4 different untimely infants. She would not know who they belong to.
NPR counted solely 4 mother and father, together with Al-Banna — all moms, no fathers — accompanying the convoy of 28 toddler evacuees Monday. Poor communications in Gaza have made it troublesome for medics to contact lots of the infants’ mother and father.
It is not identified how lots of the mother and father are nonetheless alive.
So Al-Banna says she is going to take care of as many of those different infants as she’s in a position, on their journey out of this conflict.
Anas Baba reported from Rafah. Lauren Frayer reported from Tel Aviv, and Ruth Sherlock reported from Rome.
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