International
agencies, aid workers, and physicians are giving a harrowing picture of what
they say is the disproportionate burden and risk of war borne by the women of
the
Gaza Strip.
اضافة اعلان
The
groups reported that with a barely functioning healthcare system, extreme
shortages of food and clean water, and repeated displacement, pregnant women,
mothers, and newborns are particularly vulnerable.
According
to UN Women, out of every 10 people killed in Gaza since
October 7, seven have
been women or children, marking a ‘cruel inversion’ compared with the previous
15 years, when roughly the same proportion of civilians killed in the strip
were men.
In
a report released on Friday, the agency stated that two mothers were being
killed every hour. The figures were extrapolated by comparing demographic data
on marriage and motherhood in Gaza with the total number of women casualties.
The report also said that nearly one million women and girls had been displaced
by the ongoing Israeli war.
On
Sunday, health officials in Gaza updated the overall death toll, saying that
more than 25,000 Palestinians had been killed in the war.
Separately,
an official with
UNICEF who recently visited Gaza and met with mothers at a
hospital in Rafah, the southern city of the strip that has become the refuge of
last resort for civilians fleeing Israeli attacks, said on Friday that the
situation for pregnant women and newborns was ‘beyond belief.’
Furthermore,
a communications specialist with
UNICEF, Tess Ingram gave a briefing in Geneva
and described speaking with a midwife who said she had performed emergency
C-sections on six dead women in the past eight weeks and had seen more
miscarriages than she could count. Ingram also recounted that a woman told her
that her fetus had gone still inside her womb but wondered out loud whether it
was for the best that a baby is not born into this nightmare.
“Becoming
a mother should be a time for celebration,” she said. “In
Gaza, it is another child delivered into hell.”
The
report and Ingram’s remarks echoed the warnings of a letter published in the
most recent issue of the British medical journal, The Lancet, in which five
public health experts said that urgent protection was needed for Gaza’s
pregnant women. The
World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that there
are about 52,000 pregnant women in the strip, with about 180 births each day.
“Women
who are pregnant and exposed to armed conflict have higher rates of
miscarriage, stillbirths, prematurity, congenital abnormalities, and other
adverse outcomes,” they said. “What we are currently witnessing will most
probably create long-lasting generational effects.”
Read more Region and World
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
