Sabreen died before she could look her baby in the eyes or hold her.
The young mother had carried her daughter in her womb for seven and a half months. There were days and nights of constant fear, but Sabreen hoped the family’s luck would hold until the war in Gaza ended.
That luck vanished with the roar and fire of an explosion an hour before midnight on April 20.
The Israelis dropped a bomb on the house of the Al Sakani family in Rafahwhere Sabreen, her husband and the couple’s three-year-old daughter, Malak, slept.
Her husband and Malak died instantly, while Sabreen was seriously injured, but the baby was still alive in her womb when the rescuers arrived at the scene.
They took the woman to the hospital, where doctors performed an emergency cesarean section to deliver the baby girl.
Sabreen couldn’t be saved, but doctors worked to resuscitate the baby, gently hitting her chest to stimulate breathing and pumping air into her lungs.
“He was born with severe respiratory distress”said Dr. Mohammed Salama, head of the emergency neonatal unit at the Emirati Hospital in Rafah.
But the baby, who It weighed only 1.4 kilos.survived the terrible experience of his birth.
The doctor wrote the words “baby of the martyr Sabreen al Sakani” on a piece of duct tape and stuck it to his body. Then they put her in an incubator.
“We can say that there is some progress in his health,” Salama said.
“But the situation is still risky. This respiratory distress syndrome is originally caused by premature birth. This little girl should be in her mother’s womb right now.but she was deprived of this right.”
The doctor expects him to stay in the hospital for a month.
“After that we will see if he leaves. (…) Here is the greatest tragedy: even if this girl survives, she was born an orphan,” said Salama.
In memory of his mother
His parents were no longer around to give him a name. Her dead sister, Malak, wanted to be called Rouh, which means soul or spirit in Arabic. But they called her Sabreen, in memory of her mother..
Surviving relatives gathered at the hospital, caught up in the practicalities of building a new family life for the orphaned baby while dealing with grief and anger.
The baby’s maternal grandmother, Mirvat al Sakani, spoke of the “injustice and slander” of what happened to some people who “they have nothing to do with anything”.
“My son was also with them. He was dismembered and has not yet been found. They don’t recognize it (…). Why are they attacking them? We don’t know why, how. We do not know (…). They only attack women and children,” he stated.
“An entire family erased from the civil registry and the only survivor is a girl? And what was their fault?“, asked Rami al Sheikh, the baby’s uncle.
“These are ordinary civilians,” he added.
Sabreen’s paternal grandmother, Ahalam al Kurdi, has promised to raise the girl. “She is my love, my soul. It’s a memory of her father. I will take care of her.”
“They are all children and women”
The Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry says that of the 34,000 dead in Gaza since the war began, at least two-thirds are women and children.
Israel launched its offensive after some 1,200 Israelis and foreigners – mostly civilians – were killed and another 253 were taken to Gaza as hostages in a raid by Hamas militants on October 7, according to the Israeli count.
The Israeli army insists it does not attack civilians and has accused Hamas of using the population as a human shield.
The Israeli airstrikes on Rafah on the night of April 20 also They killed 15 children of the extended Al Aal family.
The father of several of the children, Abed al Aal, said his identity was erased because all his children and his wife were killed.
“Show me a man among them. They are all children and women,” he said.
An Israeli military statement sent to the BBC after the attacks said: “At one point, the IDF [Fuerzas de Defensa de Israel] “They attacked several military targets of terrorist organizations in Gaza, including military compounds, launch sites and armed terrorists.”
There are now an estimated 1.4 million people crammed into Rafah, who were told by the IDF to move south to safety at the start of the war.
But speculation has grown in recent days that Israeli forces will soon enter Rafah to continue the fight against Hamas.
The United States has called on Israel to adopt a selective strategy rather than launch a full-scale invasion of Rafah, which could precipitate a serious humanitarian crisis there.
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