Hospital staff in Gaza say they have rescued a baby boy from his mother’s womb after she died from injuries sustained in an Israeli attack.
The woman, nine months pregnant, only narrowly survived a night of attacks that, according to Hamas-controlled health authorities, killed at least 24 people.
But once at the hospital she was beyond saving, surgeon Akram Hussein tells the AFP news agency.
However, ultrasound showed that the fetus’s heart was still beating. With the help of caesarean section, the doctors managed to deliver the child, whose critical condition could be stabilized after treatment.
The boy was placed in an incubator and has been taken to another hospital in Deir el-Balah.
The mother was one of three women and a child who died in an Israeli drone attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, according to a representative of al-Awda Hospital. The woman’s husband is said to have been injured in the attack.
Israel has not confirmed the specific attack, but the military said in a general statement that it was “conducting targeted operations against terrorist infrastructure” in central Gaza.