AFP
Gazan Hanan Bayuk’s triplets have just turned one. But since their birth in a Jerusalem hospital before the war, their mother has only seen them once in their incubators and fears that 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 had expired. After seven years of painful in vitro fertilization procedures, Bayuk was allowed to leave Gaza and give birth at Al Maqased Hospital in East Jerusalem, occupied and annexed by Israel. After the birth, she was only able to look at her daughters in their incubators for a short time, “barely half an hour,” before returning to Gaza because her permit “expired and the hospital urged 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 very rare in Gaza hospitals even before the war between Israel and Hamas. Two days after she asked for 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, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures, in the deadliest action in the history of the State of Israel. The Israeli military campaign against Gaza has already caused more than 40,250 deaths in Gaza, according to the Ministry of Health of this Palestinian territory ruled by Hamas. The UN human rights office says that most of them are women and children. Like Bayuk, Heba Idris suddenly found herself surrounded by war and unable to return to Jerusalem to take with her her only daughter, Saida, born prematurely in the same hospital in Al Maqased two months earlier. The 27-year-old Palestinian hoped to bring her home to Shujaiya in the northern Gaza Strip in the autumn. But since then, she and her husband Saleh, who has only seen his daughter in photos, have had to move nine times because of shelling 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 am crying all the time,” she explains on one of the few days when the telephone network in Gaza works. “Sometimes I think that I would like my daughters to go back to Gaza before I die because I have never kissed them, but then I take a second and tell myself that it is better for them to be safe away from the war,” she says. The girls are cared for by staff at Al Maqased Hospital. The director of its neonatal intensive care unit, Hatem Jamash, says that in normal times they would not be able to cope. 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 occupied West Bank. And with checkpoints closing more frequently, even those with permits are finding it difficult to access specialist treatment in Jerusalem.
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