Gaza newborn dubbed ‘miracle’ after airstrike fatally injures pregnant mother

GAUZE:

Nine months pregnant, Ola Al-Kurd was eager to hold her baby and bring new life to Gaza during a war that has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians and leveled much of the enclave.

That special moment never came.

An Israeli airstrike hit the family’s home in Al-Nuseirat in central Gaza on July 19, according to her father Adnan Al-Kurd. The explosion threw Ola several floors to her death in the house, whose residents include women, children and the elderly, she said.

Somehow, her baby survived, as did her husband, who was hospitalized.

“It’s a miracle that the fetus stayed alive inside her when she was martyred (died),” said Adnan Al-Kurd, thinking of a photo from his daughter’s graduation.

The blast, like many others, killed several members of a single family, a daily tragedy across Gaza since Israel launched its assault on Gaza in response to a devastating cross-border attack by Palestinian Hamas militants on October 7 last year.

Mediators from the United States, Qatar and Egypt have failed in several attempts to secure a ceasefire. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that Israeli airstrikes and bombings will end anytime soon.

“She wanted to hold her child in her arms and fill our house with his presence,” Al-Kurd said. “He was saying, ‘Mom, I hope this will make up for the loss of my martyred brothers and bring life back into our home.’

Completely against the odds, surgeons at Al Awda Hospital in Nuseirat – where Ola was first taken after the strike – managed to deliver the newborn, Malek Yassin. He was then taken to Al Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah, where an aunt touched the baby’s face as he lay in an incubator.

“Thank God, this baby’s life was saved and he is now alive and well,” said doctor Khalil Al-Dakran at the hospital, where many medical facilities have been destroyed in more than nine months of war.

Al-Kurd looks at photos of his three children killed in the Gaza war. He said baby Yasin is blond like Omar’s dead uncle. “I go to visit him every day. It’s part of me,” he said.

Babies surviving frequent Israeli bombardments are not relieved as the conflict wreaks more havoc in the densely populated Gaza Strip.

“We are actually facing very big difficulties in the nursery department,” said Al-Dakran, due to a lack of sufficient medicine and supplies and fears that the hospital’s generator could stop at any time due to a lack of fuel.

Hospitals across impoverished Gaza have been demolished or badly damaged during the war, which began when Hamas-led militants attacked Israel, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages according to Israeli accounts.

Israel has responded with an air and ground offensive that has killed more than 39,000 Palestinians, according to Hamas-run Gaza’s health ministry, and leveled much of the coastal territory.

“What is wrong with this child who begins his life under difficult and very bad conditions, deprived of even the most basic needs of life?” Dakran said.