It was during a shelling of the hospital that the babies were hastily forced to be left behind by hospital staff, according to employees who NBC News spoken to. The director of the hospital, Mustafa Al-Kahlot, tells the television channel that the evacuation took place under heavy fire and that the staff made the assessment that they could not take five children with them, several of whom were born prematurely and dependent on oxygen machines.
Two weeks after the evacuation, during the temporary ceasefire, a journalist from the Emirati Al-Mashad television channel visited the hospital and discovered five dead infant bodies. The American television channel has seen the raw material and writes that the film appears to show how at least three of the infant bodies have had time to start rotting.
Experts have reviewed the material
NBC has had two independent forensic experts review the material. According to experts, the advanced stages of decay are consistent with the roughly two weeks that passed from the time the children were abandoned to when the footage was shot.
– The blame and the reason for their death are things we cannot determine yet, but that does not reduce the effect of this film on people, says NBC’s reporter Yasmine Salam to SVT.
“We had to leave”
NBC also writes that this information was confirmed by a nurse affiliated with the organization Doctors Without Borders, who volunteered at the hospital.
– We had to leave the patients in their beds, says the nurse in a video according to the TV channel.
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a human rights organization registered in Geneva, is calling for an international independent investigation into the deaths.
“Their bodies were found in a decomposing state in what could amount to a horrific execution and a crime against humanity,” the organization writes in a statement.