Trapped in Gaza, Palestinian mothers have been separated from their babies for a year

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 “dying 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 Israeli-occupied and annexed East Jerusalem.

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 it requested a new permit to leave Gaza on October 5, Hamas commandos penetrated southern Israel in the unprecedented attack that sparked the current war.

Islamist militants killed 1,198 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli data, in the deadliest attack in Israel’s history.

The Israeli military campaign against Gaza has already caused more than 40,250 deaths in Gaza, according to the Ministry of Health of the Hamas-ruled Palestinian territory. The UN human rights office says the majority 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 Al Maqased hospital two months earlier.

The 27-year-old Palestinian woman 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 their daughter in photos, have been displaced 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’m crying all the time,” she told AFP on one of the few days when Gaza’s battered telephone network was working.

“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 are caring for the girls. The director 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 sharply cut those granted to Palestinians in the occupied 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, no babies have been born.

But the hospital workers are not short of work. Some of them regularly call Hanan Bayuk so 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 my daughters will grow up without knowing me,” says the mother.

son/sbh/lba/kir/dbh/meb