On November 8, the United Nations Human Rights Office reported the latest batch of horrific statistics from Gaza: They found 80% of victims in Gaza are killed by Israeli strikes on residential buildings, and 70% of fatalities are women and children.
"The health needs of Palestinian women and children are skyrocketing. Babies are born in hell," one unnamed doctor in Palestine told Tessa Pope, the spokesperson for Medical Aid for Palestinians who recently spoke with Jezebel. As of this week, Gaza’s health ministry counts over 45,150 Palestinians killed since October 2023. But the Costs of War Project at Brown University recently estimated that — with the help of $17.9 billion in funds from the U.S. — the actual death toll is likely well over 100,000, and this figure still veers on the conservative side. In addition to attacks from Israeli forces, the Costs of War Project attributes this to mass starvation and the total decimation of Gaza's health system and infrastructure.
Over the last month, Jezebel spoke with several health care workers on the ground in Gaza as well as humanitarian organizations, who described a war overwhelmingly victimizing newborns and pregnant women. In January, Care International shared with Jezebel that the miscarriage rate had increased by 300% since October 2023, and Pope reported that this figure hasn't changed. Meanwhile, Ammal Awadallah, executive director of Palestine Family Planning and Protection Association (PFPPA), which is part of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, told Jezebel that not only is she “still hearing about C-sections without anesthesia,” but she’s heard from doctors who have increasingly “seen women with C-sections developing infections that spread right up to their chest.”
Hospitals still aren't functioning; medical supplies still aren't arriving; and women are either unable to reach a hospital or unable to deliver in a clean and sterile environment if they do. “When people talk about PTSD, it doesn’t apply to Gaza, because it’s never ‘post.’ It’s a situation of continuous trauma," Awadallah said. "Previously, Gaza was an open prison, but now it’s fully closed. It’s a cage.”
In early November, James Elder, a UNICEF officer who routinely works in war zones, returned from his fourth visit to Gaza this year. This time, Elder visited hospitals in the middle region of Gaza. “It gets worse every single time I return,” he told Jezebel. He recounted hospital floors “absolutely packed with elderly and children” and the pervasive “smell of burning flesh, almost everywhere I went.” At al-Aqsa Hospital, he befriended a six-year-old child named Hamid who suffered from “fourth-degree burns so severe he had no skin left.” Prior to meeting the child, Elder hadn’t even heard of “fourth-degree burns” — the horrors in Gaza are at a scale so intense, he said, that he’s constantly forced to learn new medical terms. Gaza has the highest number of child amputees in the world per capita, according to the U.N.
"Premature babies are particularly vulnerable, with many dying due to a lack of oxygen and incubator availability,” Dr. Thabat Saleem, an OBGYN working for PFPPA in Gaza, told Jezebel. “Postpartum complications like sepsis are becoming increasingly common." Saleem warned that critical shortages in antibiotics and basic hygiene supplies are further threatening lives. On top of this, he reported that the few remaining hospitals in Gaza are operating at 250% capacity and “healthcare infrastructure is nearing complete collapse.” Only nine of Gaza’s 17 partially functioning hospitals and four field hospitals currently provide any maternity services at all, according to Pope.
Most people in Gaza are currently giving birth at home — or, more likely in tents, given that about two million people in Gaza are displaced, Elder says. He stressed that ambulances that would otherwise transport women in labor to the hospital are sometimes directly targeted by Israeli forces. Elder recently visited one camp where he met a midwife who helped deliver four babies in tents in the span of one week. “Giving birth is supposed to be a time for celebration,” Elder said. But in Gaza, most new mothers are also mourning the loss of loved ones, and sometimes their entire families. If women are able to deliver in hospitals at all, they’re returning to tents, not homes, and often just hours after giving birth. Some newborns are soon immediately orphaned.
In August, MAP spokesperson Tarneem Hammad told Jezebel that Gaza’s maternal mortality rate has increased over 20% since October 2023, with a 15% increase in infant mortality since February. There are no updates on these figures, but Elder said a significant factor in miscarriages and maternal mortality has been constant cases of pregnant women trapped under rubble; they’re often crushed or suffocated to death, but if they live, “obviously, that causes them to miscarry."
Israel’s campaign of starvation has also devastated maternal and postpartum health for both women and newborns. Costs of War Project researchers estimate that “96% of Gaza’s population faces acute levels of food insecurity, with 2.15 million people in crisis levels of hunger or worse.” Pope told Jezebel that “food scarcity is having a devastating impact on pregnant women, increasing the risk of babies born with health complications," and Awadallah added that mass starvation is predictably “affecting menstrual cycles, pregnancies, breastfeeding.”
In October, the Biden administration gave Israel 30 days to improve humanitarian conditions in Gaza or lose U.S. funding. That deadline flew by, and even with the U.N. last week reporting conditions in Gaza are “consistent with genocide,” the Biden administration declined to take action. On November 26, Biden announced a new push for a ceasefire deal "over the coming days," but, quite predictably, that hasn't come to fruition. Instead, over the weekend, Israeli forces bombed yet another humanitarian vehicle from U.S. chef José Andrés's World Central Kitchen, this time killing three aid workers. Last week, Biden approved another $680 million arms sale to Israel.
According to recent reports, President-elect Donald Trump and his allies are determined to secure a "ceasefire" deal in Gaza before he even takes office in January. But "ceasefire" has become an almost entirely hollowed-out word, and Trump has previously, inexplicably suggested the Biden administration is too tough on Israel. Whatever happens on that front under the incoming administration, Trump is expected to reimpose the anti-abortion global gag rule, which he established on his fourth day of office in 2017. This would slash funding to organizations that offer reproductive care abroad. Earlier this month, in a press release shared with Jezebel, IPPF said they expect to lose $60 million in federal funding under the Trump administration.
“With only marginal exceptions, every single person in Gaza is sick, injured, or both,” 99 physicians who served in Gaza wrote in an October letter to President Biden. “We worry that unknown thousands have already died from the lethal combination of malnutrition and disease, and tens of thousands more will die in the coming months, especially with the onset of the winter rains in Gaza. Most of them will be young children.”
In October, a new article published by a group of doctors in Lancet Journal questioned whether there will be any “future for newborns in Gaza,” warning that Israeli forces are deliberately targeting maternal hospitals as well as blockading medical supplies like maternity kits. “Our colleagues in Gaza… who face the horrors of this large-scale violence daily, report an unprecedented rise in maternal deaths, miscarriages, and stillbirths. The malnutrition that many pregnant women endure only exacerbates these outcomes,” the article states. “The prevention of births within Gaza is not merely collateral damage—it is a violation of international law, a grim reminder of the structural violence imposed on this population.”
Elder told Jezebel that Gaza is “the most horrific war on children” he’s witnessed yet: “That isn’t just a headline. That’s the reality.”
