Doctors Save Unborn Child of Pregnant Woman Killed in Gaza

Shayma was born during an attack on the Gaza strip. But when doctors pulled her tiny body from the womb, her mother Shayma al-Sheikh Qanan had already died, the AFP reported.

“We tried to revive her but she had died on the way to hospital,” Fadi al-Kharti, a doctor at Deir al-Balah hospital in Gaza, told AFP. “Then we noticed movement in her stomach, and estimated she was about 36 weeks pregnant,” he said.

The twenty-three-year-old was in her home in the central Gaza Strip town of Deir al-Balah when an explosion struck nearby. Doctors performed an emergency Caesarian section and saved the baby, who was named after her late mother.

The newborn, now four days old, is currently in an incubator in an intensive care unit, but doctors worry about long term damage to her brain as her mother was dead for more than an hour before she was born. She will have to spend at least three more weeks in the hospital, AFP reported.

Her father, a 27-year-old journalist, was also severely injured in the explosion.

In the past four weeks, more than 1,050 Palestinians have died, according to Palestinian health organizations. UN figures show that most of the casualties are civilians: more than 230 children and around 120 women have died so far in Gaza.