The three children that Gaza native Hanane Bayouk gave birth to in Jerusalem before the war are approaching their first birthdays, but they have seen their mother only once, and she fears she will “die without them.”
The 26-year-old had to return to the Palestinian territory alone after giving birth to Najoua, Nour, and Najmeh on August 24, 2023, because her Israeli travel permit had expired.
After seven years of painful IVF procedures, Bayouk was allowed to leave Gaza and give birth to the baby at Al-Maqassed Hospital in East Jerusalem.
She saw her babies in the incubator “barely an hour and a half later,” and then returned to Gaza because her permit “expired and the hospital told me to leave.”
Bayuk was scheduled to return in early October after her daughters spent several weeks in incubators, which were in short supply in Gaza hospitals even before the Israel-Hamas war began last October.
away from war
On October 5, two days after applying for new exit permits, Hamas commandos attacked the Erez Terminal, the only access route from Gaza into Israel.
The unprecedented attack by militants deep inside Israel left 1,198 people dead, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed 40,265 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry, though the ministry did not provide a breakdown of civilian and operative deaths. The U.N. human rights office says most of the dead were women or children.
Like Bayuk, Heba Idriss was also besieged by war and unable to return to Jerusalem to collect her only daughter, Saida, who was born prematurely two months earlier in Maqassed.
The 27-year-old woman hoped to bring her newborn baby back to her husband, Saleh, at their home in Shuja’iya in the northern Gaza Strip.
Instead, the couple has been displaced nine times by Israeli air strikes or evacuation orders, and her husband, Saleh, has only seen photographs of Saida.
“I want to see my daughter. I am feeling very bad being separated from her,” she said, crying.
Hanane Bayuk was also evicted from her home and now lives in a displaced persons camp in the south, where she lives in a tent with seven of her in-laws.
“It drives me crazy. It took me so long to get pregnant, and now I cry all the time,” she told AFP when she was able to reach Gaza’s struggling phone network.
“Sometimes I think I want my daughters to go back to Gaza before I die, because I have never kissed them, but then I pull myself together and tell myself it’s better for them to be safe, away from the war,” she said.
Hatem Khammach, director of the neonatal intensive care unit at Maqassed, says in normal times there would have been no space to keep Nour, Najmeh and Najoua for so long.
I cry every time
But the number of births at the hospital has fallen sharply since Israel stopped issuing travel permits to mothers arriving from Gaza and cut the number of permits granted to mothers arriving from the occupied West Bank.
As more and more checkpoints close, even those with permits face difficulty receiving specialist treatment in Jerusalem.
“Before the war, we had seven or eight Gaza infirmaries in our department, which could hold 30 at a time,” Khammach said.
No one has come since October, “and many sick people from the West Coast are unable to reach us”.
But the hospital’s health care workers stay busy, like the ones who let Beuk call and speak to her three daughters.
“My husband can’t do this. I do this and I cry every time we hang up the phone. I’m afraid my daughters will grow up without knowing me,” Bayuk said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
