Baby born in Gaza dies after mother killed in Israeli airstrike, family completely wiped out

A baby born last weekend in the Gaza border town of Rafah has died after her mother was killed in an Israeli airstrike yesterday. Her uncle announced this.

Sabreen al-Sheikh was born by caesarean section after her parents and her 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 was in poor condition at birth. She spent all those days in an incubator in another hospital’s intensive care unit. The child was buried next to her parents immediately after her death.

“We were connected to this child 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 it’s taken by all of them. My brother’s family has been completely wiped out. It was deleted from the population register. There is no trace of them.”

On the day Sabreen’s family was killed, at least seventeen more children were killed in Rafah by Israeli bombing, according to local authorities.

According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is led by Hamas, more than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed in the current war in Gaza. Two thirds of the victims are said to be women or children. The Israeli army says it has killed about 13,000 Hamas fighters.