▲ Gazan Hanan Bayuk’s triplets were born a year ago in Israel. Her mother had to leave them in an incubator to re-apply for her visa, but war broke out and she has not been able to return.AFP Photo
Afp
The newspaper La Jornada
Sunday 25 August 2024, p. 19
Jerusalem. Trapped in Gaza, Palestinian mothers have been separated from their babies for a year. After giving birth in Israeli hospitals, their premature babies or those in need of special care were left in the care of hospital staff.
They had to return to Gaza because their residence permits had expired; they were supposed to return after renewing their visas, but the outbreak of war prevented them from completing the process.
Gazan Hanan Bayuk’s triplets have just turned one. But since their birth in a Jerusalem maternity ward before the war, their mother has seen them only once in their incubators and fears she will die without kissing them.
The 26-year-old woman had to return to the Palestinian territory alone after giving birth to Najwa, Nur and Najmeh on August 24, 2023 because her travel permit to Israel expired.
After seven years of painful in vitro fertilization procedures, Bayuk was allowed to leave Gaza and give birth at the Al Maqased hospital in East Jerusalem, occupied and annexed by Israel.
After the birth, she was only able to spend a short time looking at her daughters in their incubators, barely half an hour, before returning to Gaza because her permit expired and the hospital asked me to leave.
Bayuk was supposed to return to the hospital in early October after her daughters had spent several weeks in incubators, which were in short supply in Gaza hospitals even before the war between Israel and Hamas.
Far from war
Two days after he requested a new permit to leave Gaza on October 5, Hamas commandos penetrated southern Israel in the unprecedented attack that sparked the current war. The Islamist militants killed 1,198 people, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data.
Tel Aviv’s military campaign against Gaza has already claimed more than 40,250 lives, the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory’s health ministry said. Like Bayuk, Heba Idris found herself suddenly surrounded by war and unable to return to Jerusalem to take her only daughter, Saida, born prematurely in the same hospital in Al Maqased two months earlier.
The 27-year-old Palestinian had hoped to bring her home to Shujaiya in the north of the strip in the autumn, but since then she and her husband, Saleh, who has only seen his eldest daughter in photos, have had to move nine times because of bombings or evacuation orders from the Israeli army.
I want to see my daughter. I suffer so much being separated from her, she says, crying.
Hanan Bayuk also had to leave her home and now lives in a camp for displaced people in the south, sharing a tent with seven members of her in-laws.
It drives me crazy. It took me so long to get pregnant and now I’m crying all the time, she told AFP.
Sometimes I think I wish my daughters would go back to Gaza before I die because I’ve never kissed them, but then I take a second and tell myself it’s better for them to be safe away from the war, she says.
I cry every time
The staff at Al Maqased hospital care for the girls. The head of its neonatal intensive care unit, Hatem Jamash, says that in normal times they would not be able to care for them, but the number of births at the centre has fallen sharply because Israel stopped issuing travel permits to pregnant women in Gaza and also significantly cut those granted to Palestinians in the reoccupied West Bank.
Moreover, as checkpoints close more frequently, even those with permits are finding it difficult to access specialized treatment in Jerusalem.
Before the war, we had seven or eight babies from Gaza in our apartment, which can accommodate 30 at a time, Jamash explains. Since October, none have been born.
But the hospital workers are not short of work. Some of them regularly call Hanan Bayuk so that she can speak to her triplets on the phone. My husband can’t, but I can, and I cry every time I hang up. I’m afraid that my daughters will grow up without knowing me.
