Palestinian Mothers Are Desperate To Reach Their Newborns Other Side Of The Border (image @EyeonPalestine)
Palestinians are the perfect embodiment of resilience. Their stories shuttle between awe-inspiring and mind-boggling. As their first birthday is approaching, the triplets, Najoua, Nour and Najmeh, will not see their mother, and are not sure when they will be able to have a glimpse of her again.
The 26-year-old Gaza-native Hanane Bayouk gave birth to the triplets in Jerusalem before the current war started. She had to return to the Palestinian territory alone after giving birth to Najoua, Nour and Najmeh on August 24, 2023, because her Israeli travel permit had expired.
Bayouk received a permit to exit Gaza and give birth in annexed east Jerusalem’s Al-Maqased hospital after seven years of painful IVF procedures. She is now afraid that she might “die without them”.
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Bayouk only got a glimpse of her little ones in their incubators, “barely an hour and a half”, before driving back to Gaza after her permit “expired and the hospital told me to leave”. She was supposed to return to Jerusalem in early October after her daughters had spent several weeks in incubators, which were in short supply in hospitals in Gaza even before the war started.
Two days after she applied for a new exit permit, Hamas attacked Tel Aviv and the subsequent war started.
Like Bayouk, Heba is another mother yearning to be near her only daughter, Saida, who was born prematurely at the Maqased two months earlier. The 27-years-old mother hoped that she could bring her newborn back to her husband Saleh at their home in Shujaiya, in the northern Gaza Strip.
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However, instead of uniting with their daughter, the couple has been displaced nine times either by Israeli strike or evacuation orders. Their father has only seen them in pictures. “I want to see my daughter, I suffer so much from being separated from her”, she said in tears.
“It drives me crazy. It took me so long to get pregnant, and now I’m crying all the time,” Bayouk told AFP on one of the rare days she was able to get through on Gaza’s struggling phone network.
“Sometimes, I think I’d like for my daughters to return to Gaza before I die because I have never kissed them, but then I get a hold of myself and tell myself it’s better for them to be safe far from the war,” she said.
(With inputs from aagencies)
