JERUSALEM
\nAs their first birthday approaches, the triplets Gaza-native Hanane Bayouk gave birth to in Jerusalem before the war have seen their mother just once, and she fears she will \u201cdie without them.\u201d The 26-year-old had to return to the Palestinian territory alone after giving birth to Najoua, Nour, and Najmeh on August 24, 2023, because her Israeli travel permit had expired.
\nBayouk received a permit to exit Gaza and give birth in annexed East Jerusalem\u2019s Al-Maqased Hospital after seven years of painful IVF procedures. She caught a glimpse of her children in their incubators, \u201cbarely an hour and a half,\u201d before driving back to Gaza after her permit \u201cexpired and the hospital told me to leave.\u201d
\nBayouk was supposed to return in early October after her daughters had spent several weeks in incubators, which were in short supply in hospitals in Gaza even before the Israel-Hamas war erupted last October.
\nTwo days after she applied for a new exit permit on Oct. 5, Hamas commandos blasted through the Erez terminal, the only entry point from Gaza into Israel.
\nOnce in Israel, the militants carried out an unprecedented attack that left 1,198 people dead, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally based on Israeli official figures.
\nIsrael\u2019s retaliatory military campaign has killed 40,265 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the territory\u2019s Health Ministry, which does not give details of civilian and militant deaths. The UN rights office says most of the dead have been women or children.
\nLike Bayouk, Heba Idriss found herself surrounded by war and unable to return to Jerusalem to get her only daughter, Saida, born prematurely at the Maqased two months earlier.
\nThe 27-year-old had hoped to bring her newborn back to her husband Saleh at their home in Shujaiya, in the northern Gaza Strip.
\nInstead, the couple has been displaced nine times by Israeli air strikes or evacuation orders, and her husband Saleh has only seen pictures of Saida.
\n\u201cI want to see my daughter. I suffer so much from being separated from her,\u201d she said in tears.
\nHanane Bayouk, too, has been forced from her home and now lives in a displacement persons\u2019 camp in the south, sharing a tent with seven of her in-laws.
\n\u201cIt drives me crazy. It took me so long to get pregnant, and now I\u2019m crying all the time,\u201d she said on one of the rare days she was able to get through on Gaza\u2019s struggling phone network.
\n\u201cSometimes, I think I\u2019d like for my daughters to return to Gaza before I die because I have never kissed them, but then I get a hold of myself and tell myself they should be safe far from the war,\u201d she said.
\nBack at the Maqased, neonatal intensive care unit director Hatem Khammach says that in normal times, there would not have been space to keep Nour, Najmeh, and Najoua for so long.
\nBut the number of births at the hospital has fallen sharply as Israel has stopped issuing travel permits to mothers from Gaza and slashed the number given to mothers from the occupied West Bank.
\nWith more checkpoints closed more often, even those with permits struggle to access specialist treatment in Jerusalem.
\n\u201cBefore the war, we had seven or eight Gaza babies in our department, which can host 30 at a time,\u201d Khammach said.
\nSince October, none have come, \u201cmany sick people from the West Bank can\u2019t reach us.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
JERUSALEM As their first birthday approaches, the triplets Gaza-native Hanane Bayouk gave birth to in Jerusalem before the war have seen their mother just once, and she fears she will \u201cdie without them.\u201d The 26-year-old had to return to the Palestinian territory alone after giving birth to Najoua, Nour, and Najmeh on August 24, 2023, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":427039,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-427020","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world"},"yoast_head":"\n