Palestinian mums brace for a life of ‘suffering’ as they raise wartime babies in the ‘worst conditions’
- For the women in Gaza who gave birth on October 7, war is all their children have known
- The future they had hoped for their children is fading, as they grapple with homelessness, hunger and illness: ‘all of our lives will be spent in a tent’
Rockets streaked through the morning sky in Gaza on October 7 as Amal Al-Taweel hurried to the hospital in the nearby Nuseirat refugee camp, already in labour.
After a difficult birth, she and her husband, Mustafa, finally got to hold Ali, the child they spent three years trying to have.
Meanwhile, Rola Saqer’s water broke that day as she sheltered from Israeli air strikes in Beit Lahia, a Gaza town near where Hamas militants streamed across the border hours earlier in the attack that kicked off the war.
She and her husband, Mohammed Zaqout, had been trying to have a child for five years, and not even the terrifying explosions all around would stop them from going to the hospital to have their baby that night. Saqer gave birth to Masa, a name that means diamond in Arabic.
Both families emerged from the hospitals to a changed world.
On the babies’ second day of life, Israel declared war on Hamas and its fighter jets swooped over the neighbourhoods where Ali and Masa were supposed to grow up. In the six months since the children were born, the couples have experienced the trials of early parenthood against the backdrop of a brutal conflict.