Diseases, miscarriages, hunger and threats: the lives of women in Gaza is no life
Doctors and international organizations are warning of particularly serious harm to the condition of women in Gaza, and consequently to their children as well
By Nir Hasson and Sheren Falah Saab • Translated by Mark Marshall
According to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), about 150 Gazan babies were born on every day of the 458 days of the war, and all their days were spent in hardship and destruction. Tens of thousands more will join them in the coming months. According to UNICEF, today in Gaza there are about 155 thousand pregnant and breastfeeding women, and about a million women live in displacement camps. Apart from the war damages that are familiar to all residents of the Strip, doctors, human rights organizations and international organizations are warning of particularly severe harm to the condition of women and girls in Gaza, and consequently to their children as well. Diseases, miscarriages, injuries, hunger and lack of basic hygienic conditions debase the lives not only of women, but also the lives of those they bring into the world.
Following the collapse of the health system in the Strip it is hard to get precise data on illness, miscarriages and premature births. In the first months of the war the Palestinian health ministry reported a 300% rise in the number of miscarriages in the Strip, and since then no additional data have been published. In a UN survey from late December of pregnant and breastfeeding women, 76% of the pregnant women reported anemia, and 99% reported difficulty in getting medical services and nutritional supplements. 55% reported health problems that affected their ability to breastfeed, and 99% experienced a shortage of mother’s milk. According to UNICEF 96% of babies and breastfeeding women in Gaza are do not receive adequate nutrition.
In recent months the nutrition problem has gotten worse: at beginning of November the United Nations Population Fund estimated that in Gaza about 3,000 pregnant women suffer from “a catastrophic level of food insecurity”. According to UN experts, today that number stands at 8,000. Apart from the emotional stress, pregnant women must contend with a daily physical struggle (for example, fetching water), infections, lack of clean water, dehydration and other problems. Dr. Fidaa an-Nadi, a pediatrician from Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, said last week to Radio Alam that even if women get food, it is mostly canned food of low quality that is deleterious to their health and the health of their unborn children.
According to the doctor, due to shortages of neonatal departments and incubators, doctors are sometimes forced to put two or three premature babies into the same incubator. According to NBC, before the war there were 105 incubators in three hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip. IDF attacks shut down most of the obstetrical departments, and in November only nine functioning incubators remained in the Kamal Adwan hospital. With the evacuation of the hospital by the IDF a week and a half ago, no incubators are available in the entire northern Gaza Strip.
Azzi Abu Jiab, a Palestinian social activist and translator, recently told the story of two pregnant women in Gaza: Hala al-Hasi, 25, was wounded in her leg by Israeli gunfire at the home of the neighbours, when she was in her second month of pregnancy. After a week she began to suffer from bleeding and pain, and only after 12 hours did her husband succeed in taking her to the hospital in a horse-drawn wagon. “I waited for hours until I managed to enter the examination room because hundreds of women were waiting for their turn”, al-Hasi told Abu Jiab in an interview published on the website of Daraj and the Van Leer Institute’s Forum for Regional Thinking. “After the examination, the doctor decided I needed an operation to remove the fetus from my uterus”. According to her, six hours after the operation the doctors had to release her from the hospital due to overcrowding.
Anan Abu Jami, 30, told Abu Jiab that her pregnancy ended in the third month after the IDF gave orders to evacuate the neighbourhood where she lived in the city of Bani Suheila. She was forced to run and walk for kilometres until she got to a displacement camp. On first night in the camp she had bleeding and pains, and the next day in the hospital it was found that the fetus had no pulse. According to her, she was the seventh woman who had a miscarriage in the hospital that day.
A no less serious problem is the increasing shortage of means of contraception, which leads to unwanted pregnancies. Sanaa, 34, from Khan Younis who has been uprooted from her place of residence four times during the war, told Haaretz: “The women in Gaza are paying a heavy price in their health. There’s a shortage of contraception, and women can’t go to a gynacologist. Those who have an intrauterine device and need to replace it, or who need a routine follow-up consultation guidance on contraception — they have none of that”. Sanaa criticized the fact that economic hardship encourages parents of young women to marry them off for the traditional payment they receive from the families of their sons-in-law. “Marriages like that lead to unplanned pregnancies”, she said, “hardship causes parents to marry the girls off for sacks of flour or a new tent. Families want to survive even at the cost of marrying off their daughters and the consequences that follow”.
Noor, 19 and a mother of two from Gaza City, who now lives with her family in Deir al-Balah, added: “When the war started I said to my husband that we cannot have more children, and he agreed with me. There are no educational facilities, and it is impossible to carry a pregnancy when you’re uprooted from place to place. A pregnant woman needs privacy and a secure space. That doesn’t exist in the Strip”. According to her, the issue of contraceptives is a social taboo in Gaza. “We talk about the shortage of food, water, medicine. We talk about the destruction. But we don’t talk about the lack of contraception. It is frustrating that every woman is responsible for her fate, and if she gets pregnant it may not end well. A friend of mine got pregnant and her physical condition deteriorated. She could not get prenatal care, and she had gestational diabetes. She is supposed to give birth soon, and she does not know where she will give birth and where they will live”. When UNRWA people were still working in the Strip, said Nur, they distributed contraception and gave information about family planning. “Today contraceptives are sold for high prices, and not everybody has money”.
Destructive consequences
A common problem in the Strip, which is only getting worse, is the shortage of hygienic products for women and girls, who are forced to use rags and other improvisations. Susan (a pseudonym), a nurse in the southern Gaza Strip, told the Gisha organization: “The population that suffers the most are the adolescent girls and pregnant women. Girls who are getting their periods for the first time could not get pads and appropriate products, and their mothers were not emotionally available to guide them through the new experience –not to speak of the shortage of water, sanitation and hygiene products that has caused many infections, especially among women and girls”. According to Susan, “I had no way of getting for those girls the products they need or to help them to take care of themselves in clean and safe conditions. Those were the hardest requests of all. I was helpless. All that remained for me to do was to try to support them and reassure them”.
According to the UN Women, 690,000 of the women who are living in displacement camps (most of them in the south of the Strip) are of menstruating age. Apart from the other hardships that the residents of the camps are suffering from, women and girls suffer from a more severe shortage because of the lack of the basic hygiene conditions, including toilet paper, soap, running water and toilets. “I received women, I examined them and diagnosed the kinds of infections they were suffering from, but I could not help them more than that, because the solution to the problems is good hygiene”, said Susan, “they cannot maintain hygiene because of the lack of products, and I could not always give them medicines, because of the shortage of medicines”.
Other problems in the camps are the lack of privacy and the absence of security for women. A survey carried out by the UN in four tent camps two weeks ago found that people are forced to walk long distances to get to toilets. Since women and girls fear walking at night and exposing themselves to danger, they are forced to improvise alternatives in order to relieve themselves.
“The chronic stress and traumatic events have destructive consequences for the physical and mental health of pregnant women and the health of their children”, read a report from the [Israeli] organization Physicians for Human Rights last week. “The World Health Organization also sees in the psychological price of the war a direct and sometimes fatal effect that leads to miscarriages, stillbirths and premature births. As long as the nightmare in Gaza continues, the suffering of pregnant women and breastfeeding mothers will only get worse”.
