When a mother's joy turns to ashes: UNICEF details trauma of pregnancy in war-torn Gaza

Life in Gaza is bleak for all Palestinians amid the war. Tales of entire families being wiped out by Israeli bombs and warnings of a looming "full-fledged famine" cut right through society.

But this week, UN officials on the ground have highlighted the increasing number of horror stories from mothers and women in the Strip, whose situation, they say, is now "beyond breaking point."

"The conditions are very serious," Tess Ingram from the UN's Children's Fund (UNICEF) tells CGTN Europe, describing how pregnant women in the enclave are desperately trying to keep their babies healthy while cut off from access to proper food and shelter.

The destruction of most of Gaza's healthcare system also means that the estimated 52,000 pregnant women living there who urgently need medical attention are often unable to get it. There have even been reports of some women having to undergo procedures, including Caesarian sections, without anesthesia.

"I spoke to one woman," says Ingram. "She told me about how her husband was buried underneath the rubble in their home. She managed to survive the attack, her husband also managed to survive, but her baby inside had stopped moving." 

After the destruction of their home, Ingram says the woman hadn't been able to get any sort of scan for her baby because care during pregnancy is basically non-existent in Gaza right now due to the massive demands on its few remaining hospitals.

"She was sure that the baby had died," says the UNICEF worker. "And it had been a month since the attack on her home, and she was still waiting to have some sort of medical assessment."

"I think everything that we describe and when we speak to each other, when we see images on the news is true," says Ingram. "But it is absolutely magnified when you're there on the ground."

However, the main issue that kept on coming up while she was in the southern Gazan cities of Rafah and Khan Younis, she says, was the lack of food and clean water that families have, "and the real challenges that women, particularly pregnant women, are going through."

In fact, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food said the Gaza Strip is facing "inevitable famine" now because of the decision by Western countries to pause funding for the UN's agency for Palestinian affairs. That's after Israeli accusations that 12 of the group's 13,000 employees took part in last year's October attacks. 

"If you're a pregnant woman, you're trying to keep yourself healthy for the benefit of your future child. And I think that so many of the mums that I spoke to had had serious struggles with nutrition," says Ingram.

"Many of them had children already, and they said that they were really trying to make sure that they had enough food for themselves and their children, but there just wasn't a lot of food to go around, and what they were able to get isn't particularly nutritious."

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Another problem for women trying to protect their families has been their inability to to bring their baby home to somewhere safe, she says.

"Many are living in makeshift shelters on the streets, are exposed to the elements. It's really cold in Gaza at the moment. It's the coldest month of the year. And a lot of these babies, I met one, that was returning to a makeshift shelter hours after being born, with no clothes."

It's perhaps no surprise under such conditions that miscarriage rates have shot up by 300 percent in Gaza. Meanwhile, the uncertainty of being pregnant during a conflict, and the fear of what your baby is going to be born into, has also exacerbated concerns for the psychological effects of the conflict. 

"We can only imagine what that would be like," says Ingram, "their reality of worrying about whether their pregnancy would make it through to birth and then what the prospects were for that baby."

She says that many pregnancies are complicated because of the conditions in the war. "Many of the babies were being born not completely healthy. And so the mums were aware of that and concerned about the moment of birth and what might happen; but also then about returning a baby to a shelter where they couldn't guarantee the safety of the child."

"It definitely has an impact on the mental health of these women," she says. "Unicef is there trying to respond as best we can… but the needs are so enormous, that we really need a ceasefire to be able to meet those needs."

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