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Every morning since October 7, Nour Shath has woken up, scanned her body, and felt relief that her twin babies were still inside her. Each additional day, her doctor has told her, makes their birth less likely to require an obstetric or neonatal intervention that might not be available in Gaza.
But even after those morning checks reassure her that she’s one day closer to a normal, safe delivery, Shath told me, she feels a deep, wrenching fear—one she worries she’ll transmit to her babies: “Are they feeling scared inside me?” she asks herself. She wonders whether they can sense when she cries, and whether the stress will induce premature labor.
“I am a working counselor, I know how to deal with negative thoughts,” she told me by text during one of Gaza’s brief interludes of data coverage. “But I try everything without anything helping. I am under stress most of the time.”
“I told my husband I don’t feel safe giving birth in Gaza,” she told me.
Shath is one of approximately 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), which also estimates that of Gaza’s population of 2.2 million, one in four are women and girls of reproductive age. With mass displacement and shortages of basic necessities, giving birth in Gaza has become precarious. UNFPA has received reports of women undergoing C-sections without painkillers or anesthesia.
Dominic Allen, the representative for UNFPA in the Palestinian territories, told me that some 180 women go into labor each day in Gaza, a startling number of them prematurely because of the stressful circumstances. With all of those preterm babies, fuel for incubators is especially important. During the cease-fire, medical organizations managed to negotiate the delivery of some fuel and other supplies to hospitals in the north. But Allen told me that his contact at Al Hilo Hospital, the primary maternity hospital in Gaza City, has reported a complete collapse of prenatal, delivery, and postnatal care for both mothers and babies.
I connected with Noura Al-Zaeem, a mother of two, through a mutual friend in early November. She had just given birth to her second child, a son, on October 30, at a hospital in Gaza City. She told me that she’d heard that painkillers might not be available, so she didn’t ask for them. The delivery was terrifying: She could hear air strikes close by, and she worried that they would hit the hospital.
Al-Zaeem needed stitches afterward, and her recovery was not easy. As a physiotherapist in a clinic focused on burn patients, she knew something about caring for sutures. She also knew that her persistent pain was likely a sign of infection. But to go back to the hospital in the weeks after the birth would have been far too dangerous. She texted me on November 18 to say, “I am suffering. I have sutures and severe pain and no available water to bathe to improve healing and prevent infection.”
After their son’s birth, the family had evacuated to the south, where they crowded into an apartment with extended family members. The newborn developed a fever, so they brought him to a hospital teeming with refugees and bought him medicine on the black market when they couldn’t find the remedy they knew. Her husband spends hours searching for clean water, food, and medicine for the family. At home with her children during long days of intermittent bombing, Al-Zaeem has had to find ingenious ways to calm her toddler: When they hear explosions, she and her relatives begin clapping and smiling. They tell him that the bombs are extra-loud fireworks. He still covers his ears and hides.
Another Gazan mother, Asmaa Alhayek, who gave birth during the May 2021 war and again this August, told me that she soothes her eldest by pretending that the bombing sounds are made by confused, extra-large birds. But sometimes, she told me, he catches her looking scared, and their roles reverse. He tells her, “Don’t be scared, Mom. It’s bird sounds.”
All three mothers—Shath, Al-Zaeem, and Alhayek—spoke to me of the limited opportunities available to their children in Gaza and of the trauma into which the children were born. I asked the mothers whether, if given the chance, they would move away. All three said more or less the same thing:
Gaza is their world. Their families, friends, and jobs are all there. Alhayek told me that she had considered trying to go to Egypt for the duration of the war, but she worried that her family would be denied reentry to Gaza afterward. Living in a temporary shelter in the south was hard enough, she said. “I want my home, and I always dream that I am back there.”
Shath is now almost six months pregnant. During the cease-fire, a few trucks from medical charities and UNFPA entered the Gaza Strip with safe-delivery supplies, anesthetics, and other necessities for infants and new mothers. Allen estimates that hospitals now have enough supplies to support basic and complicated deliveries for the next month and a half.
Shath sounded positive in light of that news. The twins are kicking, she told me. I asked her what she dreams of for them in the years to come. She could not possibly think of the future, she told me. But for now, every night before she goes to sleep, she says to them, “Come in safety, please.”
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