NOS News•today, 3:36 PM
A baby born last weekend in the Gazan border town of Rafah after her mother was killed in an Israeli airstrike died yesterday. Her uncle announced this.
Sabreen al-Sheikh was born by caesarean section after her parents and four-year-old sister were killed in their home. Emergency workers knew the mother was pregnant and had taken the victims’ bodies to the hospital.
Sabreen was 30 weeks old and not in good condition at birth. She spent all those days in an incubator in the intensive care unit of another hospital. The baby was buried next to her parents immediately after her death.
Completely wiped out
“We were attached to this baby in a strange way,” her uncle Rami al-Sheikh told the AP news agency. “God had taken something from us, but He had also given us something. Now He has taken them all. My brother’s family has been completely wiped out. They have been erased from the population register. There is no trace of them left.”
On the day Sabreen’s family was killed, at least seventeen more children were killed in Rafah by Israeli bombardments, according to local authorities.
It is estimated that two-thirds of the more than 34,000 Palestinians killed in the war in Gaza are women or children. The Israeli army says it has killed some 13,000 Hamas fighters.
