At least six newborn babies have frozen to death over the past week in Gaza, after humanitarian groups have warned for months that Israeli forces are blocking the entry of crucial cold weather supplies to the besieged enclave.
The latest death came on Monday, when 21-day-old Ali al-Batran died in the intensive care unit of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Gaza City. The baby’s twin brother, Jumaa, died from hypothermia on Thursday.
The twins’ father, Yahya al-Batran, told media outlets that he woke up on Sunday morning and felt Jumaa’s head, which was “cold as ice,” he said. The family’s home was just a tent covered with blankets. They took the twins to the hospital, where the doctor told al-Batran that Jumaa was dead. The twins were named after family members who had, just weeks ago, been killed in Israeli strikes, per Middle East Eye.
“We are eight people, and we only have four blankets,” the twins’ father told Al Jazeera. “There is no electricity. The water is cold, and there is no gas, heating or food…. My children are dying in front of my eyes, and nobody cares.”
Over the past few days, Gaza authorities have recorded four more newborns’ deaths due to the cold, ranging from four days to 20 days old. Officials have also recorded at least one adult who has died from hypothermia recently.
Temperatures have dipped to the 40s, in Fahrenheit, at night, with Palestinian families weathering rain and wind, in ramshackle shelters mostly made up of makeshift tents, on the beach. Al-Batran said that dew regularly seeps through the cracks of his family’s tent, making the inside wet.
For months, Israeli forces have been blocking humanitarian groups from bringing supplies like clothes, tents and winterization supplies into Gaza. The UN said recently that nearly 1 million Palestinians in Gaza — about half the population — lack proper winter supplies. The head of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), Philippe Lazzarini, has said that winter supplies have sat in aid trucks lined up outside of the border for months, waiting for approval from Israel that often never comes.
Malnutrition also makes people, especially children and babies, more susceptible to conditions like hypothermia. The director for medical relief in Gaza and North Gaza, Muhammad Abu Afash, has said that babies are dying every day from “severe cold and the lack of necessities of life such as food, drink and baby milk,” per Palestinian news wire Wafa.
Ahmed al-Farra, the head of the pediatric ward at Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza, told NBC that the hospital sees two to three cases of hypothermia a day.
There have likely been more deaths to hypothermia that have gone unrecorded by health officials. Such deaths are not counted in the official death tally of the genocide reported by Gaza health officials as they count instead as “indirect” deaths not caused by something like a bomb or gunfire by Israeli forces.
Palestinians instead often resort to burying their family members without reporting their deaths; Israel’s policies of killing Palestinians on sight in some places, its constant bombardments, and prohibitive costs due to a lack of basic resources have made it almost impossible to travel across the region to reach health care. Health care, meanwhile, is an extremely sparse resource because of Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s health system.
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