Three babies froze to death in recent days at the al-Mawasi refugee camp in southern Gaza amid Israel's continuous blockade of food, water and essential winter supplies into the war torn territory. The latest to die was a three-week-old baby girl who froze to death overnight on Tuesday.
The father of 3-week-old Sila, Mahmoud al-Faseeh, wrapped her in a blanket to try and keep her warm in their tent in the Muwasi area outside the town of Khan Younis, but it wasn't enough, he told The Associated Press.
He said the tent was not sealed from the wind and the ground was cold, as temperatures on Tuesday night dropped to 9 degrees Celsius (48 degrees Fahrenheit.) Muwasi is a desolate area of dunes and farmland on Gaza’s Mediterranean coast.
“It was very cold overnight and as adults we couldn’t even take it. We couldn’t stay warm,” he said. Sila woke up crying three times overnight and in the morning they found her unresponsive, her body stiff.
According to Faseeh, the baby "had bitten her tongue and was bleeding."
“She was like wood,” he said. They rushed her to a field hospital where doctors tried to revive her, but her lungs had already deteriorated. Images of Sila taken by the AP showed the little girl with purple lips, her pale skin blotchy.
According to Israel's weather service, temperatures in Gaza in recent days were as low as eight degrees Celsius (46 Fahrenheit) at night.
Ahmed al-Farra, director of the children’s ward at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, confirmed that the baby died of hypothermia. He said two other babies — one 3 days old, the other a month old — had been brought to the hospital over the past 48 hours after dying of hypothermia.
"This is due to the fact that they live in tents," said Farra.
"The tents do not protect from the cold, and it gets very cold at night, with no way to keep warm," he added.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, displaced multiple times amid relentless attacks by the Israeli army, crammed into often ramshackle tents as the cold, wet winter sets in. Aid groups have struggled to deliver food and supplies and say there are shortages of blankets, warm clothing and firewood.
According to multiple reports, Israel has been deliberately preventing food, water, medicine and other essentials from entering into Gaza. It has also repeatedly attacked aid convoys and civilians gathered to collect whatever aid that manages to pass through the borders.
The U.N. has declared a famine in parts of Gaza. An independent panel of aid experts found that nearly half of the Palestinians in the enclave are struggling with hunger. Many go days without eating. Palestinian authorities say dozens of children have starved to death.
Investigations by two foremost US government agencies in September this year concluded that Israel has been interfering with aid works in Gaza by deliberately blocking essential supplies, killing aid workers, razing agricultural structures, bombing ambulances and hospitals, sitting on supply depots and routinely turning away trucks full of food and medicine.
Meanwhile, the health ministry in Gaza said on Thursday that 38 people had been killed by Israeli airstrikes in the past 24 hours. This includes five journalists who were killed in an Israeli airstrike outside the Al-Awda Hospital in the built-up Nuseirat refugee camp in the central part of Gaza.
One of them, Ayman al-Jadi was killed while he was waiting outside the hospital as his wife was in labour to give birth to their first child.
Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza has so far killed over 45,300 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children. The offensive has caused widespread destruction and displaced some 90% of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, often multiple times.
(With inputs from AP, AFP)