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.
The hospital director warned as Israeli firepower continues to pound surrounding streets and remaining fuel reserves dry up, leaving the facility unable to function.
It was gathered that staff at the Al-Shifa hospital were fighting to keep the newborns alive 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.
“I was with them a while ago. They are now exposed because we have taken them out of the incubators. We wrap them in foil and put hot water next to them so that we can warm them,” the medical center’s director, Dr. Muhammad Abu Salmiya, told Al-Araby TV on Sunday.
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.
The director general of Gaza’s health ministry, Dr. Medhat Abbas, said 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 as their mother. This temperature can only be offered in the incubators, which are heated properly,” Abbas added.
He warned that the situation would only worsen as winter approached.
A freelance journalist inside Al-Shifa described dozens of bodies yet to be buried; ambulances have been unable to collect the wounded, and life-support systems have no electricity to function. Medics are working by candlelight, food is being rationed, and people inside are starting to drink piped water, the journalist said.
Ministry spokesman Dr. Ashraf al-Qidra said the Al Shifa complex was “out of service” after repeatedly being targeted by Israeli fire and that the “intensive care unit, pediatric department, and oxygen devices have stopped working.”
The World Health Organization says Al-Shifa has been without power for three days. “Regrettably, the hospital is not functioning as a hospital anymore,” it said.
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