Miscarriages in Gaza surge by 300 percent due to Israel's aid blockade

Israel's extermination campaign has disproportionately targeted women and children, leaving Gaza with the world's highest rate of child amputees per capita

News Desk - The Cradle

Miscarriages among pregnant women in the Gaza Strip have surged by 300 percent due to Israel's blockade of humanitarian aid shipments, according to figures from the Palestinian Health Ministry reported by Al-Akhbar.

The rate of miscarriages soared after Tel Aviv ordered the closure of the Kerem Shalom crossing earlier this month, cutting off the flow of essential medications, including heparin injections critical for women with blood clotting disorders.

Without medicine or sanitary supplies, the situation for pregnant women in Gaza is “catastrophic,” according to Dr. Suha al-Masri, a Gaza obstetrician who says hospitals struggle to offer only "primitive solutions.”

"Due to the shortage of medication resulting from the blockade, we find that many of them are silently losing their fetuses or living the remainder of their pregnancies under the constant threat of losing the baby at any moment,” Masri told Al-Akhbar.

“We are not only losing mothers and fetuses, we are losing a future that was meant to be born,” she added.

"I felt like a part of me had died. My son wasn’t just a victim of my health condition; he was also a victim of the siege. The occupation killed my fetus, not with missiles, but by withholding my medication,” said Nisreen Ayyad, 29, a resident of Gaza City who recently had a miscarriage.

“Whenever I hear about an imminent bombing, I put my hand on my stomach and tell it: Hold on. Don’t be afraid; Mom is with you. But I’m the one who’s afraid. I’m afraid he’ll be killed before I see him,” Ruba Masoud, 28, told Al-Akhbar.

According to figures released by the Gaza Health Ministry, at least 950 infants under one year of age have been killed since the start of the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza.

After the collapse of a brittle ceasefire last week, Israeli attacks have killed over 270 Palestinian children.

“if you are a child in Gaza today, you have most likely been displaced multiple times, are living in a tent, don’t have food security, have lost multiple members of your close community, and have fallen asleep every single night … to the sound of drones and bombs falling from the sky,” Dr. Tanya Haj-Hasan, pediatrician for Doctors Without Borders (MSF), said in a report from the NGO last June.

According to multiple international agencies, at least 25,000 children have been injured by the Israeli onslaught, including between 3,000 and 4,000 children who have had one or more limbs amputated, making Gaza home to a higher number of child amputees per inhabitant than any other place in the world.

Nearly 70 percent of verified deaths in Gaza since 7 October 2023 were women and children, according to a November report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).