Premature babies at Gaza’s largest hospital are being wrapped in foil and placed next to hot water in a desperate bid to keep them alive in “catastrophic” conditions, the hospital director has warned, as Israeli firepower pounds surrounding streets and remaining fuel reserves dry up, leaving the facility unable to function.
Staff at the Al-Shifa hospital were fighting to keep the newborns alive and warm after oxygen supplies ran out and they had to move the babies by hand from the neonatal unit’s incubators to a different part of the hospital. Meanwhile, a reporter for the Al Arabiya network who was inside the hospital told CNN that people were trapped there, too scared to flee due to the heavy fighting.
“There is no more water, food, milk for children and babies… the situation in the hospital is catastrophic,” the director of the medical center, Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya, told CNN on Monday.
Images show several newborn babies who were taken from incubators at the hospital placed together in one bed.
The doctor on Sunday told Al Araby TV that several children had died in the intensive care unit and the nursery over the past two days amid Israel’s unrelenting bombardment and blockade of Gaza, an already impoverished and densely packed territory, following the October 7 attack on its territory by Hamas militants.
Dr Medhat Abbas, the director general of Gaza’s health ministry, told CNN that medical staff at Al-Shifa kept four infants alive after their mothers died by performing C-sections. “Now they have to make it without their mothers and without electricity… Can you imagine that?” he said in a voice note.“When these babies are born prematurely, to sustain their lives they need to have the same temperature of their mother. This temperature can only be offered in the incubators, which are heated properly,” Abbas said.
He warned that the situation would only worsen as winter draws in.
An Israeli military spokesperson told CNN on Saturday its forces were engaged in “ongoing intense fighting” against Hamas in the vicinity of the hospital complex, but denied firing at the northern Gaza medical center and rejected suggestions the hospital is under siege.
Asked about the hospitals in Gaza at an unrelated Oval Office event Monday, President Joe Biden told reporters, “hospitals must be protected.”
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