Around 52,000 pregnant women are said to be in Gaza right now, but pregnancies and births are said to be increasingly risky.
At the same time as there is a severe shortage of food, water and medicine, there are reports of women being forced to undergo caesarean sections without anesthesia or painkillers.
– Every day we receive first-hand testimony and it is heartbreaking to take part. It only gets worse every day, says Frida Lagerholm, head of communications at Doctors Without Borders about the situation for civilians in Gaza.
25,000 people have been killed in the war between Israel and Hamas, the AFP news agency reports, citing the Ministry of Health in Gaza. Many of the victims are women and children and the humanitarian situation is getting worse and worse as there is a great shortage of basic necessities such as food, water and medicine.
Caesarean section without anesthesia
It is estimated that around 52,000 pregnant women are in Gaza and, according to the UN, around 180 children are born per day. There have also been reports of women being forced to undergo caesarean sections without anesthesia and injured children being amputated without pain relief.
– It is completely inhumane. I’ve had a c-section myself and can’t even imagine what it would be like to do it without anesthesia. We try with the funds we have, but we see that there is a lack of just about everything, says Frida Lagerholm.
– For 109 days we have witnessed a complete humanitarian disaster, but what we are seeing now is an extremely bloody war where many, many civilians are affected and where humanitarian law is completely out of play, she continues.
Mothers are bleeding
About 70 percent of the 25,000 people killed are women and girls, according to the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. Women are forced to give birth, in total darkness, in tents or out on the street, often without access to doctors or maternity care, writes Washington Post.
As airstrikes drive people into an increasingly smaller part of Gaza, disease and famine spread, while breastfeeding for women becomes increasingly difficult and the risk of anemia increases. Forty percent of pregnancies in Gaza are considered high risk, the newspaper writes.
– Seeing newborn babies suffer while their mothers bleed to death is something that keeps us all up at night, says Tess Ingram, communication specialist at UNICEF to Sky News.
Almost 20,000 babies have been born since the war broke out. In addition to women who were forced to undergo cesarean sections without anesthesia, Tess Ingram also claims to have met a nurse who assisted in cesarean sections on six dead women, reports the Washington Post.
Civilians seek shelter in hospitals
Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza is one of the few hospitals that is one of the few hospitals still functioning. In addition to the more than 850 patients, there are also thousands of Gazans who have sought protection from the bombs in the hospital.
– We hear bombs falling, we hear ground troops outside and smell the smoke, so the war is very close wherever you are in Gaza today, says Frida Lagerholm about what her colleagues at Doctors Without Borders on the ground in Nasser Hospital testify to.