Abu Khater, along with the rest of the staff in the maternity ward at Al-Shifa Hospital, was transferred to another hospital immediately after his birth, as fighting approached. Kinda, whom she had only seen briefly, remained in the incubator. The weeks that followed were hellish. “I cried every day,” she said.
I learned from the radio that Israeli soldiers surrounded Al-Shifa Hospital. The hospital ran out of fuel to operate the incubators. Children were dying. She and her husband, Samer Lolo, 28, were unable to reach the medical staff there. Finally, in the third week of November, news came from relatives in Jordan, who saw a list online of the names of children evacuated from Shifa: Kinda was alive, and in Egypt.
The World Health Organization said she was among 31 newborn babies, wrapped in aluminum blankets and medical instruments, who were taken to a relatively safe location by a UN mission and the Palestine Red Crescent Society “under extremely tight and high-risk security conditions.” Eight of the 39 premature babies died before the rescue, according to Palestinian health officials. Three remained in southern Gaza.
The twenty-three infants who were evacuated to Egypt and survived face a future full of uncertainty. Some have been reunited with their parents, but are still at risk. Others appear to be alone in the world, their families dead or unreachable – raising puzzling questions about who is responsible for their care, and what will happen to them when the war is over.
Abu Khater's journey to her daughter began with a harrowing journey south during a week-long cessation of fighting in late November. The couple slept in the streets of southern Gaza until Abu Khater – not her husband – was allowed to cross into Egypt in early December.
Kinda had liver inflammation and bowel problems. She was unable to eat and lived on intravenous fluids. But as the weeks passed in this gleaming hospital in Egypt's new administrative capital outside Cairo, she became healthier and stronger.
This month, kinda She comes out of the incubator.
“I felt like a mother,” Abu Khater, 23, said of their reunion, as she held her daughter — small and wide-eyed — in her hospital room. “Before that, I didn't feel like a mother.”
Down the hall, in two rooms lined with cots, eight children were lying unclaimed. They are known only by their mothers' names, taken from the birth marks affixed to their ankles.
For at least two of them, news reports and social media posts provide evidence of the tragedies that marked their early days: Ibn Fatima al-Harash (“Son of Fatima al-Harash”), sleeping face down in striped underwear, was the perfect solution. The sole survivor of an airstrike that killed 11 members of his family in October. He was extracted from his mother's womb before she died of her wounds in a hospital in northern Gaza. According to news reports at the time.
Halima Abd Rabbo's son cannot open his right eye, which was injured in an attack. A copy of his medical file Shared on social mediaA handwritten note reads: “Family members are martyrs.”
When the babies arrived at the hospital, medical staff thought they had less than a 20 percent chance of survival, according to Khaled Rashid, a neonatologist. They were severely dehydrated, were “extremely ill” and could not breathe on their own. Most of them weigh about three pounds. He added that they became infected during the flight, causing sepsis, which is “the biggest killer of newborns.”
Five of the 28 children have died since their arrival in Egypt.
“All the staff here did their best to preserve their lives, and thank God they succeeded with these children,” Rashid said last week, as he inspected a nursery full of sleeping infants.
Five mothers, whose contact information Gaza health workers tracked down and wrote on a list, accompanied their children to Egypt, according to Osama Al-Nims, a nurse from Gaza who arrived with them and stayed here for about two months.
He said: “We left our phone numbers everywhere so that the children's families could contact us.” During the truce in November, eight additional mothers and fathers contacted and were later approved to travel to Egypt.
Almost all the children at Cairo District Hospital are now out of intensive care. They take the bottles and breathe on their own. They gain weight.
For the eight who remain unclaimed, no one seems to know where their parents are, or if they are still alive. Hospital staff say they have little information to go on, and it is not their job to investigate.
Ramzi Mounir Abdel Azim, the hospital's general director, said that after nearly three months of caring for them, “all the nurses have become their own mothers now.”
Nurse Wafa Ibrahim, 24, said she has come to recognize glimpses of their personalities: Sindos al-Kurd’s daughter, the smiling child with reddish hair, is the most vocal (“She will scream and scream until she breastfeeds”). Heba Salah's daughter, whose father was able to come to Egypt but lives an hour away by car She needs “affection and tenderness,” Ibrahim said as she shook the crying child to calm him down.
“I don’t know what will happen to them,” she added. “I'm afraid for them.”
Hundreds of other children were evacuated from Gaza to Egypt to receive treatment, according to the Palestinian ambassador to Cairo, Diab Al-Louh. He said that “a very small number” of them arrived alone, but acknowledged: “We do not have a detailed list.”
Relief organizations and Palestinian authorities say ongoing fighting, patchy communications and the collapse of governance in the Gaza Strip have complicated attempts to locate relatives of unaccompanied children from Gaza. Israeli bombings have wiped out or displaced entire large families, making the search even more difficult.
Ahmed Majdalani, Minister of Social Development in Ramallah, said in a WhatsApp message that the Palestinian Authority has formed a committee to address this issue, but “the results are very modest.”
While groups such as UNICEF, Save the Children and the International Committee of the Red Cross have extensive experience searching for families in conflict settings, they say this is the first time the need has arisen in Gaza, where family networks exist. Strong. It has largely protected children during past conflicts.
Reunions between parents and children in Egypt, of which there were nine in total, were largely the result of word of mouth, dangerous journeys and a lot of luck.
When Israeli forces surrounded Al-Shifa Hospital, Hala Arouq, 24, lost contact with the staff caring for her premature daughter, Massa. She did not know that any of the children had been evacuated until her husband's family in Turkey called with the news.
Uruk and her husband were unable to pass an Israeli checkpoint to reach Massa in southern Gaza. A worker at the Emirati hospital there called Arouq to authorize him to transfer the child to Egypt. After two weeks of waiting, she was allowed to travel to Cairo with her 3-year-old son, Bakr.
Nour Al-Banna (30 years old) learned that her twin daughters, Lynn and Layan, had been rescued from Al-Shifa Hospital from her sister-in-law, who happened to work in the Ministry of Health in Gaza, and she saw the names of the two girls on the list.
Al-Banna had been desperately trying to reach them for weeks. But it remained stuck in the south, where Israeli soldiers blocked the road to the north. “It was cold and dangerous. Cars were not allowed,” she said.
“I thought: 'It's over, they're gone.' 'I'm not going to have kids,'” she recalls.
When she learned of their evacuation, Al-Banna rushed to Rafah to be with her twins, then traveled with them to Egypt.
Doctors say that most of the children are healthy enough to be discharged from the hospital. But they have nowhere to go.
Some of the children were sent last month to a child care home in Cairo with their mothers. The twin boys caught a cold there and later died in hospitals; Their deaths highlighted the vulnerability of children and halted their releases.
Alwa said that the children will remain in the hospital for the time being. An Egyptian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic, said that Egypt would continue to care for them “until coordination is made with the relevant Palestinian authorities regarding their future.”
The Egyptian Ministries of Health and Social Solidarity did not respond to requests for comment.
UNICEF has called for family-based care instead of institutional care. “If we succeed in contacting their families, these children will develop normally, without any neurological deficit,” said Rashid, the doctor in Egypt.
In December, the Palestinian Ministry of Social Development in Ramallah issued a decision to stop adopting children from Gaza without the ministry’s permission.
“It is too early to talk about this matter now, and to treat these children as orphans,” said Al-Louh, Egypt’s ambassador to Egypt. “After the war, we will start looking for their families.”
Hajar Harb in London and Sima Diab in Cairo contributed to this report.
