Losing a Baby in the Gaza Concentration Camp
What survival looks like when survival is no longer possible
So you’re in a tent. You’re in your mid twenties. Last year you became a mother for the second time. Your husband was killed by a tank shell when he was out to get water six months ago. They only found his arm and his head. After he was hit the tank that killed him found it necessary to drive over him. The spot where he died looked like the ground of an abbatoir. Neither of you are politically involved. He was a fisherman before October 7th and you were a homemaker, in hip American lingo. You have two children. One is four and has stopped speaking entirely, even though before October 7th he talked non-stop, prattling commentary on anything he was doing while playing and firing off questions about whatever new thing he discovered. Now not a word. When a stranger comes near, he growls.
Your daughter is 8 months old. She has chronic diarrhea. She is always cold, so you try to keep her practically glued to your own skin, close to your warm breath, covered in several layers, but the layers are too thin. You’d need a thick fur coat to really keep her warm like this. Your grandfather used to talk about how warm those are. He studied engineering in Moscow in the 1960s. Try finding fur coats in Gaza though. Try finding anything in Gaza now.
Your parents are dead, your father died in the invasion of 2014 when the building he was doing some repair work in was struck by Israeli bombs. His chest was crushed by falling debris and he clung to life in a hospital for two days.
Your mum died of a heart attack while fleeing her home in northern gaza begin November 2023. She was carrying her most prized possessions, family photo albums, pots and pans and blankets made by her own great great grandmother. In her arms she was carrying one of her 2 year old grandchildren, your niece, the youngest daughter of your brother. Current whereabouts unknown. Your mum collapsed and with her last strength prevented her granddaughter from hitting her head on the ground. She went without saying a word.
So the last thing you remember her saying was hours before her death: ‘What about Kareem’s birthday cake?’ She had prepared a cake for your brother and when people started rushing to the south she realized she couldn’t take it with her.
So now you are in a tent with your two kids and your niece. Your sister in law is also dead. She got hit by a sniper right above the knee and bled to death in little truck used to transport poultry before October 7th. A tourniquet could have saved her life, but in the chaos nobody had the reflex to perform this simple procedure. Her last words were: ‘Please treat my little girl as if she was your own.’ Your niece will have not even one memory of her own mother, so yeah, you will indeed be the only mum she will ever know.
You had some hope when the ceasefire was announced, but today Israel has announced that no goods will be coming in. The doctors have told you that your baby girl is in critical need of pure water and antibiotics. All expected to come in on lorries, now held up near the Egyptian border.
The few times you get to go online with your phone distant relatives abroad think it’s a good idea to send you some of the mocking videos Israelis are making. Thanks to posts on telegramme you know that a burned Palestinian child is a ‘hotdog’ and what happened to your husband Israelis call ‘making a Palestinian pancake’.
On social media you also see plenty of users with no profile pictures repeat and again and again that ‘winning a war you didn’t start, is not a war crime.’ And when babies die here, those people will write ‘Palestinians should take better care of their children.’ Salt in open wounds, because everyone here is fighting round the clock to keep their children alive.
In the tent next to you lives a family and their three year old girl has lost both legs. She crawls around as if she’s never known anything else. Initially she had lost only her feet when the flat they were in was bombed, but because of the dire situation in the healthcare system that Israel targets she got infected again and again until she lost both of her little legs. At night you can hear her mum wail and beat herself with a leather belt. Usually she screams that she should have kept the girl in the bath tub. The mum has heard that babies who were kept under a flipped over bath tub survived some bombardments unscathed. Sometimes the father stares at you and mutters: ‘I don’t know why she tortures herself like that. We didn’t even have a bath tub in our flat, we only had a shower installed.’
Your baby girl will die in the course of next week, because no aid will reach you on time. So the war gave you an extra daughter and will take one daughter away.
Today you hear ten year old boys talk about the situation. One says: ‘As soon as Hamas turns over all the hostages, the Israelis will resume their offensive. It will be worse than before. They can’t defeat our warriors, but they can kill all the rest of us. They will cut Gaza down the middle again. Their ships will bombard the coast line, their air force will pummel us, their tanks and artillery will randomly shoot at tents and we will all be forced to flee to the Egyptian border. Then Trump will threaten Egypt with economic sanctions and they will have to take in those that survive.’ An other boy asks: ‘So why don’t we go to the Egyptian border right now and be the first ones in?’ The answer: ‘Don’t be silly, if we start moving to the Egyptian border now the Israelis will shoot us because they will think we will try to smuggle in aid.’ The other boy nods as if he should have known that himself.
The war has turned kids into military and political analysts.
But not your baby girl. She is a shivering leaf of a little human, any fluids you manage to put in, her cramped up body flushes out. You can see she’s losing the strength to even cry about her situation. Her color is fading. She has your husband’s eyes and they look dry and glazed over, as if she’s already crossing the threshold to some other world.
A dwindling autumn leaf before she could fully enjoy her first spring.
With her will die the tree she grew on. Though the tree will keep standing and will have some leaves left, inside the tree will be dead and petrified.
The newspapers will not print your girl’s name and no tower will be lit up to match the color of her first curls, because this is not a regrettable death in the eyes of the ruling class, this is an execution.
I will never understand this abject cruelty. NO animal, other than a human being, would do this to another of its species. I truly wish I could do more than pray as my prayers on this are not being answered.
Unimaginable suffering!