In Gaza, death is no longer an event that follows birth, but one that precedes it. There, Gaza’s unborn children do not wait for the moment of birth to face their fate, but are taken from life while still fetuses, without even the chance to cry out for the first time, without even a single first breath.

At the Nasser Medical Complex in Khan Yunis, doctors recorded the deaths of 13 children in 24 hours on Sunday. They included 10 fetuses who died in their mothers’ wombs and three premature babies who breathed their last breaths, after their fragile bodies were unable to withstand the cold and darkness due to power cuts and a shortage of incubators.

Medical staff confirmed that six of these cases arrived from the north of the Strip. This was after a journey fraught with fear, hunger, and thirst, during which the mothers suffered from severe malnutrition and acute psychological breakdown. It’s all as a result of continuous Israeli shelling and forced displacement. Their bodies were exhausted by hunger and their hearts were worn down by loss, so death was faster than life.

Gaza’s unborn children: fetuses are being lost in the womb, and hospitals are mourning life.

The scene is no longer an exception. What is recorded daily in Gaza’s hospitals is no longer just numbers, but recurring chapters of an escalating humanitarian tragedy. Hospitals without medicine, without equipment, without electricity. Mothers enter the delivery rooms carrying life, only to leave them weighed down by loss.

Food shortages, scarce healthcare, and the complete collapse of the medical system have turned delivery rooms into farewell stations. Every day, Gaza loses children who were never given the chance to be born. Meanwhile, miscarriage rates have reached alarming numbers, with dozens of cases daily in the Strip’s hospitals.

International warnings… and global silence

UNICEF recently warned that one in three children in Gaza suffers from severe malnutrition. Thousands of infants have been left without their mothers’ milk due to hunger and exhaustion. The World Health Organization (WHO), for its part, has clearly stated that the health system in Gaza has reached a the brink of complete collapse. WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus posted on X on Thursday 18 September that:

Hospitals, already overwhelmed, are on the brink of collapse

This is threatening the lives of every pregnant woman and every newborn baby.

At the Nasser Medical Complex, in delivery rooms that have been turned into battlefields, you don’t hear the cries of babies, but the moans of mothers and the silence of a place where the shelves are empty of medicine and there are few hands left to save lives.

Lives erased before they begin

In Gaza, children are buried before they are born. Lives are snatched from their mothers’ wombs, leaving grief in their hearts like a scar that will never heal. There, birth certificates are not issued. Instead, it’s death certificates for fetuses that the war did not allow to live for even a minute.

Faced with this horrific scene, the world remains silent. It watches from afar as the tragedy continues, with lives lost every day, not only under the rubble, but also in the heart of hope, in the womb of a mother who dreamed of giving life, not saying goodbye to it.

Feature image via Al Jazeera/Youtube

By Alaa Shamali

This post was originally published on Canary.