Born in Gaza, fleeing Gaza: two-week-old baby Amin’s family manages to escape to Egypt

Amin was born on April 14 in the maternity ward of the Al Emirati hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza. In that center, overwhelmed by the war, everything is missing and up to four babies share an incubator. The boy saw the light for the first time helped by the hands of one of his aunts, who is a midwife. He weighed 2.7 kilos and from the beginning he calmly accepted his mother’s saving breast, says the father, Ahmed (fictitious name, like that of his son), 34 years old, aware that his case “is a drop in the middle of the ocean”. “My son, you were born when thousands of lives are lost due to this cruel war. We suffer a lot, dear, facing death every day, thinking that we could be the next targets of the Israeli army,” comments the father in an exchange of messages.

Having passed the test of birth, the family’s next objective has been to flee the conflict to neighboring Egypt. This Thursday they arrived in Cairo from Rafah, a town that hosts around 1.5 million displaced people and that Israel claims it is going to invade. Ahmed and his family have followed the steps of between 80,000 and 100,000 Gazans who have escaped through the border crossing in that town, according to the Palestinian ambassador in Cairo, Diab Allouh, to the AFP agency.

Life and death go hand in hand at the Al Emirati in Rafah. In that same maternity hospital, almost on the same days that Amin was born, he spent five days in an incubator for little Sabreen al Sakani. She was extracted from the womb of her mother, Sabreen, too, seven and a half months pregnant at the time an Israeli bombing killed her along with her husband and her other daughter. The image of the doctors with the premature girl in their arms after the critical cesarean section as the only survivor in the family went around the world. She became a symbol of survival in the midst of a health system devastated by the conflict. But on April 25 she died and was buried next to her mother.

“The birth of children represents a ray of hope in a world full of terror and destruction,” acknowledges Ahmed, who in addition to being Amin’s father is the father of two girls, aged five and eight, without forgetting other daily concerns. He is referring to the rising prices and scarcity of food or the growing tension following Israel’s announcement to invade Rafah by land.

In the midst of this enormous humanitarian crisis exacerbated by the bombings, which occur daily in Rafah, there are those who turn to the only possible exit abroad, that of Egypt, “in search of a better life in peace and security,” he explains. the father. “We live in a time in which the Arab countries have left us behind. They have turned a deaf ear by offering their support to the Israeli army to complete its mission of erasing our people from the face of the earth,” laments Ahmed, who prefers that no specific data or photos of the family be published.

An example, however, that life is also making its way in the Palestinian enclave, even if it is in fits and starts, is that Ahmed keeps active other concerns that one might think would become dormant with the war. When, three days after April 14, he confirmed Amin’s birth to the EL PAÍS reporter, his message was immediately followed by a very different one: “I had a very bad night due to Barcelona’s defeat,” he wrote, referring to the 1 -4 against French PSG.

In memory of Rachel Corrie

Football is his passion and, as a resident of Gaza, he lives it without being able to separate it from the conflict. Ahmed is one of the organizers of the annual tournament held in memory of American activist Rachel Corrie. The young woman died in 2003 at the age of 23, crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer when she was trying to stop the destruction of Ahmed’s family home in Rafah. A judge exonerated the driver in 2012. The championship has only stopped being played during a pandemic and during the current war escalation.

To cross to the neighboring country, the family has had the help of friends abroad who in March opened an online petition thanks to which they have raised more than $80,000. With this, those who support them affirm, Ahmed, his wife, his children and other family members – up to 16 have fled – will be able to pay rent, stay and studies in Egypt. In some cases, to which Ahmed does not refer, crossing the border depends on appearing on a list through dark networks to which large sums of money must be paid.

“The children bear the brunt, they lose their families and become orphans in the midst of this bitter reality,” deplores Amín’s father. Reflecting the “brutality” of war is that a child is killed or injured in Gaza every 10 minutes, Tess Ingram, spokesperson for Unicef, the UN Children’s Fund, admitted in Geneva in January. In Rafah alone there are more than 600,000 minors, according to this agency, which has come to describe Gaza as a “children’s cemetery.”

Those three or four children who live together in each incubator at the Al Emirati hospital greatly increase the risk of contagion and infections, warns Jonathan Crickx, spokesperson for Unicef, by telephone. “We have reached a point where we do not know which babies will live,” Dr. Ahmed al Shaer, deputy director of the incubator unit, warned in a video a month ago, where they have gone from having 10 babies to almost 70 arriving from all of Gaza.

Throughout the Strip, where there are some 50,000 pregnant women exposed to the rigors of war, an average of 180 children come into the world every day, according to the UN. This brings the total number of births since last October 7 to more than 36,000 in a territory where only 10 of the 36 existing hospitals function and they do so partially due to attacks by the Israeli army. The war also leaves some 17,000 children alone, that is, orphaned or separated from their families, according to Unicef.

The little ones are also victims of famine, which looms like an added black cloud, especially in the north of Gaza, warns Jonathan Crickx. Severe acute malnutrition affects 4.5% of children in that area of ​​the Strip. They are children, he insists, who, due to their condition, cannot be fed normally, they need a specific therapeutic diet. This has meant that, according to the Ministry of Health of the Hamas government, 25 children under two years of age have already died from malnutrition.

In one of the most dramatic cases, the bodies of at least four babies were found abandoned in the ICU of the Al Naser hospital in Gaza City, in a state of putrefaction, eaten by maggots and flies and still attached to cables and respirators. The month of November was passing, days after the facilities were besieged, attacked and evacuated by order of the Israeli army. Others have been luckier and have been evacuated, although alone and unidentified, from Shifa hospital to Cairo.

Once in Egypt, Ahmed can’t stop thinking about where they will end up staying after being taken in by relatives for a few days and how he will get his two daughters back to school. He, too, does not forget the goal of returning to Gaza as soon as possible. Meanwhile, the father clings to the arrival of his first son, Amin: “You are the light of our lives, you have to stay strong and fight to have a better life in the future. Until then, just keep good faith that that day will come. The light will defeat the darkness, and we, as Palestinians, will claim victory.”

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