Abu Khater, along with the rest of al-Shifa’s obstetrics department, was transferred to another hospital immediately after delivering, as fighting got nearer. Kinda, whom she saw only briefly, remained behind in an incubator. The weeks that followed were hellish. “I used to cry every day,” she said.
She learned from the radio that Israeli soldiers had besieged al-Shifa. The hospital had run out of fuel to power the incubators; babies were dying. She and her husband, Samer Lulu, 28, couldn’t get through to medical staff there. Finally, in the third week of November, news came from relatives in Jordan, who had seen a list online of babies evacuated from al-Shifa: Kinda was alive, and in Egypt.
She was among 31 newborns, wrapped in aluminum blankets and medical scrubs, spirited to relative safety by a United Nations and Palestine Red Crescent Society mission “under extremely intense and high-risk security conditions,” the World Health Organization said. Eight of the original 39 premature babies died before the rescue, according to Palestinian health officials. Three stayed in southern Gaza.
The 23 infants who were evacuated to Egypt and survived face a future full of uncertainty. Some have been reunited with their parents, but remain vulnerable. Others appear to be alone in the world, their families dead or unreachable — raising vexing questions about who is responsible for their care, and what will happen to them when the war is over.
Abu Khater’s journey to her daughter began with a harrowing trip south during a week-long pause in the fighting in late November. The couple slept in the streets of southern Gaza until Abu Khater — but not her husband — was cleared to cross into Egypt in early December.
Kinda had a liver infection and intestinal problems. She couldn’t eat, and she survived on intravenous fluids. But as the weeks passed in this gleaming hospital in Egypt’s new administrative capital outside of Cairo, she grew healthier and stronger.
This month, Kinda graduated from the incubator.
“I felt like a mother,” Abu Khater, 23, said of their reunion, cradling the baby — tiny and wide-eyed — in her hospital room. “Before, I didn’t feel like a mother.”
Down the hall, in two rooms lined with bassinets, eight babies lay unclaimed. They are known only by their mothers’ names, taken from tags affixed to their ankles at birth.
For at least two of them, news reports and social media posts provide clues to the tragedies that marked their early days: Ibn Fatima el-Hersh (“the son of Fatima el-Hersh”), sleeping facedown in a striped onesie, was the sole survivor of an airstrike that killed 11 of his family members in October. He was pried from his mother’s womb before she succumbed to her injuries at a hospital in northern Gaza, according to news reports at the time.
The son of Halima Abderrabo can’t open his right eye, which was injured in an attack. A photo of his medical file, shared on social media, shows a handwritten note: “The family members are martyrs.”
When the babies arrived at the hospital, medical staff thought they had less than a 20 percent chance of survival, according to Khaled Rashed, a neonatal doctor. They were severely dehydrated, “very sick” and couldn’t breathe on their own. Most weighed around three pounds. They had acquired infections during the journey, causing sepsis, “the great killer of newborns,” he said.
Five of the 28 babies have died since reaching Egypt.
“All the staff here did their best to preserve their lives, and praise be to God, succeeded with these babies,” Rashed said last week, surveying a nursery full of sleeping infants.
Five mothers, whose contact information Gaza health workers had tracked down and scrawled on a list, accompanied their babies to Egypt, according to Osama el-Nems, a nurse from Gaza who arrived with them and remained here for nearly two months.
“We left our phone numbers everywhere for the children’s families to communicate with us,” he said. During the truce in November, eight additional mothers and a father got in touch and were later approved to travel to Egypt.
Nearly all of the babies in the Cairo area hospital are now out of intensive care. They take bottles and breathe on their own. They are putting on weight.
For the eight who remain unclaimed, no one seems to know where their parents are, or if they are even still alive. Hospital staff say they have little information to go on and it is not their job to investigate.
After nearly three months of caring for them, “all the nurses are their mothers now,” the hospital’s general manager, Ramzy Mounir Abdelazim, said.
Nurse Wafaa Ibrahim, 24, said she’s come to recognize glimmers of their personalities: The daughter of Sandous al-Kurd, a smiley baby with a dusting of reddish hair, is the most vocal (“She’ll yell and scream until she is fed”). The daughter of Heba Salah — whose father was able to come to Egypt but is staying an hour’s drive away — needs “affection and tenderness,” Ibrahim said as she rocked the crying baby to quiet.
“I don’t know what will happen to them,” she said. “I’m scared for them.”
Hundreds of other children have been evacuated from Gaza to Egypt for medical treatment, according to the Palestinian ambassador in Cairo, Diab Allouh. “Very few” arrived alone, he said, but conceded, “We don’t have a detailed list.”
Ongoing fighting, patchy communications and the collapse of governance in the Gaza Strip have complicated attempts to locate relatives of unaccompanied children from Gaza, aid organizations and Palestinian authorities say. Israeli bombings have wiped out or displaced whole extended families, rendering the search more challenging.
The Palestinian Authority formed a committee to tackle the issue, but “the results are very modest,” Ahmad Majdalani, the Ramallah-based minister of social development, said in a WhatsApp message.
While groups like UNICEF — the United Nations’ children’s agency — Save the Children and the International Committee for the Red Cross have vast experience with family tracing in conflict settings, they say it’s the first time the need has arisen in Gaza, where strong family networks have largely protected children during past conflicts.
The reunions between parents and babies in Egypt — nine in total — were largely the products of word of mouth, dangerous journeys and a lot of luck.
When Israeli forces surrounded al-Shifa, Hala Arouq, 24, lost touch with the staff tending to her premature daughter, Massa. She didn’t know any of the babies had been evacuated until her husband’s family in Turkey got in touch with the news.
Arouq and her husband couldn’t get past an Israeli checkpoint to reach Massa in southern Gaza. An employee at the Emirati hospital there called Arouq for permission to evacuate the baby to Egypt. After two weeks of waiting, she was allowed to travel to Cairo with her 3-year-old son, Bakr, in tow.
Nour al-Banna, 30, learned her twin girls, Leen and Layan, had been rescued from al-Shifa from her sister-in-law, who happened to work for the Gaza health ministry and saw the babies’ names on a list.
Al-Banna had been desperate to reach them for weeks. But she was stuck in the south, the route north cut off by Israeli soldiers. “It was cold and dangerous. No cars were allowed,” she said.
“I thought, ‘It is over, they are gone. I won’t have children,’” she recalled.
When she heard about their evacuation, al-Banna rushed to Rafah to be with her twins, then traveled with them to Egypt.
Doctors say most of the babies are nearly healthy enough to be discharged from the hospital. But they have nowhere to go.
Some of the infants were sent last month to a child-care facility in Cairo with their mothers. Twin babies caught a cold there and both later died in hospitals; their deaths underscored the infants’ fragility and put a pause on further releases.
Allouh said the babies will stay in the hospital for now. An Egyptian official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic, said Egypt would continue to care for them “until coordination with concerned Palestinian authorities regarding their future is done.”
The Egyptian ministries of health and social solidarity did not respond to requests for comment.
UNICEF has advocated for family placements, rather than institutional care. “If we succeed in contacting their families, those babies will grow normally, with no neurological deficit,” Rashed, the doctor in Egypt, said.
In December, the Palestinian Ministry of Social Development in Ramallah issued a moratorium on the adoption of children from Gaza without the ministry’s permission.
“It’s very early to speak of this now, to treat these children as orphans,” Allouh, the ambassador to Egypt, said. “After the war, we will start looking for their families.”
Hajar Harb in London and Sima Diab in Cairo contributed to this report.
