A baby who was delivered through an emergency cesarean section after her mother was killed in an Israeli strike died on Thursday, a relative said, less than a week after news of her birth brought a glimmer of hope to war-torn Gaza.
The baby, who was born prematurely after a strike in southern Gaza that also killed her father and sister, suffered respiratory problems, and doctors were unable to save her, said her uncle, Rami al-Sheikh.
“I buried her in her father’s grave,” he said in a phone interview on Friday.
The mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, was killed along with her husband, Shukri, and their 3-year-old daughter, Malak, when an Israeli strike hit their home in the city of Rafah shortly before midnight last Saturday. Rescue crews took the bodies to the Emirati Hospital in Rafah, where doctors performed a cesarean section on Ms. al-Sakani, who was 30 weeks pregnant.
The girls’ uncle said that Malak had wanted to name her little sister Rouh, the Arabic word for soul. The extended family decided instead to name her after her mother, Sabreen.
Sabreen weighed just three pounds at birth, said Dr. Mohammed Salama, head of the neonatal intensive care unit at Emirati Hospital. Her birth was captured on video by a journalist from the Reuters news agency, who filmed doctors providing artificial respiration to her after she emerged, pale and limp, from her mother.
Instead of a name, doctors initially wrote, “The baby of the martyr Sabreen al-Sakani” on a piece of tape across her chest.
“The baby was delivered into a tragic situation,” Dr. Salama told Reuters, adding, “Even if this baby survives, she was born an orphan.”
