Midwife tells of Israel's crimes against Gaza mothers and babies

Across the entire Gaza Strip, there are more than 15,000 pregnant women on the verge of catastrophic levels of hunger.

There has been a rise in premature births and maternal deaths – and many women are forced to give birth without access to medical support.

In early November, the United Nations agency for sexual and reproductive health warned that only two out of 20 health service points and the remaining hospitals in north Gaza “are still functioning as they struggle to operate without supplies, fuel, food or water.”

This means that for the thousands of pregnant and breastfeeding women in north Gaza – if they survive the daily massacres and airstrikes carried out by the Israeli military – access to prenatal and neonatal health care is heavily restricted.

And complicated and high-risk pregnancies linked with negative outcomes have increased, while access to safe childbirth services has dramatically decreased, especially in the north. Transportation challenges and a shortage of medical personnel have compounded the crisis, the agency says.

Basic hygiene, medications and safe birthing supplies have been denied entry by the Israeli army, with thousands of supply kits stockpiled in warehouses in Egypt and Jordan for months, the UN says.

Physicians published an alarming commentary in a recent edition of The Lancet medical journal, focusing on the collapse of the healthcare sector, specifically toward labor, delivery and postpartum care.

“The near-total collapse of the health-care infrastructure, coupled with the lack of access to essential medical services, has resulted in a tragic surge in preventable maternal and neonatal deaths,” the authors write.

Heba Al-Nashef, a Canada-based midwife and clinician, joined The Electronic Intifada Podcast to talk about the impact that Israel’s 14 months of attacks on Gaza have had on women and newborns in particular, and how medical providers are forced to improvise care under genocidal conditions.

She worked for six weeks at Al Awda Hospital in Nuseirat, Gaza earlier this year.

“One of the things that drew me into midwifery is the ability to empower women and folks to make decisions about their prenatal care – and subsequently, to see the transformation that the women go through during birth and giving birth to their baby, seeing them for the first time, and hold them, cuddle them, having that first skin-to-skin contact, and how powerful this experience [was],” Al-Nashef tells The Electronic Intifada Podcast.

“A woman usually remembers, for the rest of her life, how her birth went; and who held her hand and looked in her eyes and said, you got this. You can do it.”

Al-Nashef explains that women in Gaza are being deprived of a lot of these experiences.

Women who have given birth, including those who delivered their baby via cesarean section – abdominal surgery that needs careful post-operative care – are forced to leave the hospital quickly and return to their makeshift tent shelter or a school that they have been displaced to, “in really unhygienic conditions.”

These women are “having to care for a wound and for a baby; and maybe their [breastmilk] is not enough, maybe [they] don’t have access to formula, and then having to deal with the consequences of that for their newborns. So it’s just atrocious and horrendous beyond anything you could imagine,” Al-Nashef says.

She recalled that on her first day of work in Gaza, in early June, the Israeli army bombed the vicinity of the hospital during her orientation. More than 270 Palestinians were killed in that notorious massacre in Nuseirat as Israel rescued four of their captives.

“People were screaming, the women who had just delivered; there were children. It was a horrifying scene, we didn’t know what was happening,” she says.

A woman in labor came into the ward, she adds. “She was crying in horror. … And it turns out that she had witnessed her husband and five children being murdered in front of her during the raid.”

She had to “give birth while experiencing that trauma and that the pain of loss,” Al-Nashef says.

The woman had to deal “with all of these emotions that none of the people in the West can even comprehend. So I was sitting there looking, and I’m trying to make sense of this. How do you make sense of this atrocity?”

Al-Nashef describes using supplies that had to be devised due to the lack of basic medical equipment such as sutures and umbilical cord clamps. Midwives had to use the cloth strings on surgical masks, dipped in alcohol, to tie off the umbilical cords on newborns, she says.

After 14 months of this genocide, the morale of her physician colleague in Gaza hospitals is extremely low, she says.

Medical staff are witnessing the murder of their own families and their colleagues. “As a healthcare worker, you’re not even safe – you could be gang raped, taken to torture camps, and literally, no one knows what’s going to happen to you and your body,” Al-Nashef says. “After you experience all of that, [your body] might not be even given back to your family.”

“It’s just beyond anything that I could even touch on today.”