By Micheal Chukwuebuka, Reporting
DURING a barrage of intense Israeli airstrikes on the southern Gaza city of Rafah this weekend, one blast hit the family home into which Sabreen would have been welcomed, according to local health officials, hospital staff and family members. The blast killed her mother, Sabreen Sakani, who was 30 weeks pregnant with her at the time as well as her father, Shukri Joudeh, and her 3-year-old sister she never got to meet, Malak.
NBC News reported Friday that the family was declared dead at the city’s Kuwaiti Hospital on Saturday, but doctors were able to perform a posthumous cesarean section and rescue Sabreen from her mother’s lifeless body.
Limp and lifeless at first, the vernix-covered newborn weighing just over 3 pounds was taken in a golden fabric blanket and rushed to an upstairs room. There, doctors tried for more than two minutes to resuscitate her by pumping air into her mouth and tapping her chest. They were finally, somehow, successful.
From there, she was immediately rushed by ambulance through the night to an intensive care unit incubator at the nearby Emirati Hospital, audibly whimpering on arrival. It was there that her paternal grandmother and uncle paid her an emotional visit on Monday.
“I don’t know if we should be happy that she came to life or sad,” said her uncle Rami Joudeh, 25, weighing what should have been the joy of Sabreen’s arrival with the deaths of his brother and sister-in-law, who were just 29 and 27 years old. “Our lives are messy.”
The newborn’s grandmother Alham Al-Kurdi, 55, wept as she reached into the incubator.
More than 34,000 people, including some 13,000 children, have been killed since Israel launched its military campaign following the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7, according to the Palestinian enclave’s Health Ministry. That toll only looks set to rise as Israel focuses its military might on Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city that sits on the border with Egypt.
Asked for comment on the strike that killed Sabreen’s family, the Israel Defense Forces said in a statement:
“At given times, the IDF struck several military targets of the terrorist organizations in Gaza including military compounds, launch posts and armed terrorists.”
The hospital that treated the newborn is only one of three still providing maternal care for Gaza’s 2.3 million population, and 180 women a day are giving birth in “inhumane, unimaginable conditions,” according to an update from the United Nations Population Fund last week.
This takes its toll not just on the families, but also on the medical workers themselves.
At the time, Sabreen, at least, was getting stronger every day, he said. But she was by no means safe.
Because she was born almost two months prematurely, her lungs had not formed properly and she arrived with something called respiratory distress syndrome.
And in the end, Dr. Salama said, it was difficult for her lungs to absorb oxygen. On Thursday, less than a week after her birth, Sabreen died.
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