Little Sabreen was rescued from the belly of her murdered mother. Now the baby is dead, the BBC reports.
Published: 26/04/2024 10:20
The family of little Sabreen was killed in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, just before Saturday 20 April. An Israeli airstrike on the crowded town killed her mother, father and her four-year-old sister.
Their bodies were taken to the Kuwaiti hospital in Rafah. There, the doctors realized that Sabreen al-Sakani was 30 weeks pregnant.
They performed an emergency C-section on the dead woman. Inside her belly was the tiny fetus, struggling to breathe. The doctors barely managed to save her life, wrote the AP news agency.
But the baby died on Thursday and has been buried next to the mother, according to the BBC.
The baby weighed just 1.4 kilos when she was taken out of her mother’s arms. She had severe breathing problems, which the doctors believe was because she was born prematurely.
– This child should have been in the mother’s womb by now, but she was robbed of that right, said doctor Mohammed Salama, head of the emergency department of the maternity ward at the Emirati hospital in Rafah, after the birth.
16 children killed in two attacks
The baby Sabreen is thus among 16 children who were killed in two airstrikes against Rafah during the last weekend. All were killed in an attack on the residential area where they lived.
The Israeli army has stated that its targets were Hamas fighters and their equipment.
Over 34,000 people have been killed in Gaza since October 7 last year, according to Hamas-controlled Palestinian health authorities. 13,000 children have been killed in the Gaza war, Unicef said in mid-March.
The war in Gaza was triggered by a Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, in which nearly 1,200 people were killed and over 250 were abducted. 130 hostages are still being held by Hamas in Gaza.
In the last week, there have been almost daily attacks against Rafah. There are great fears that Israel will carry out its stated plans to attack Rafah with ground forces to crush Hamas’s remaining military capacity.
An Israeli attack could still force many Palestinians to flee to Egypt, writes Washington Post commentator Ishaan Tharoor. It is a scenario that Egypt has opposed.
