Displaced Gaza newborn freezes to death, twin fights for life as rain floods tents Reuters
By Ramadan Abed and Nidal al-Mughrabi
GAZA (Reuters) – Yahya Al-Batran woke up in the early hours of Sunday morning to find his wife, Noura, trying to wake up their newborn twin sons, Juma and Ali, as they lay together in a makeshift tent the family lived in in a camp in the central Gaza Strip .
The intense winter cold and heavy rain across the coastal enclave in the previous days had made their lives miserable, but what he heard was more serious.
“She said she was trying to wake up Jumau but he wasn’t waking up and I asked about Ali and she said he wasn’t walking either,” he told Reuters on Sunday. “I picked up Juma, he was white and cold like snow, like ice, frozen.”
Jumaa, one month old, died of hypothermia, one of six Palestinians to die from exposure and cold in recent days in Gaza, according to doctors. Ali was in critical condition in intensive care on Monday.
In the second winter of the Gaza war, the weather has added an extra element of suffering to the hundreds of thousands of people already displaced, often multiple times, as efforts to achieve a ceasefire go nowhere.
The death of Jumaa al-Batran shows how difficult the situation facing vulnerable families remains.
Israeli authorities say they have released thousands of aid trucks into Gaza with food, water, medical equipment and shelter supplies. International aid agencies say Israeli forces have obstructed aid deliveries, making the humanitarian crisis worse.
The family of Yahya al-Batran, from the northern town of Beit Lahiya, fled their home at the start of the war in al-Maghazi, an open stretch of dunes and scrub in central Gaza that Israeli authorities have declared a humanitarian zone.
Later, as al-Maghazi became increasingly insecure, they moved to another camp in the nearby town of Deir al-Balah.
“Being an adult I can take this and endure it, but what did the young man do to deserve this?” Juma’s mother, Noura al-Batran said. “He couldn’t stand it, he couldn’t stand neither the cold nor the hunger and this hopelessness.”
Shabby TENTS
Around the area, dozens of tents, many already worn from months of use, were blown away or flooded by high winds and rain, leaving families scrambling to repair the damage, mend torn plastic sheeting and pile sand to contain the water.
It is another facet of the humanitarian crisis facing Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, gripped by a relentless Israeli campaign against Hamas remnants and dependent on a volatile aid system that is increasingly vulnerable to looting as order falls.
Israel’s campaign against Hamas in Gaza has killed more than 45,500 Palestinians, according to Palestinian health officials, and turned the enclave into a wasteland of rubble and destroyed buildings.
The war was triggered by a Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7, 2023, in which 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken to Gaza as hostages, according to Israeli figures.
The United Nations’ Palestinian aid agency, UNRWA, said on Sunday that aid was nowhere near enough and that a ceasefire was desperately needed to deliver aid as famine threatened.
Earlier this month, Israeli and Hamas leaders expressed hope that talks brokered by Egypt, Qatar and the United States could lead to an agreement to end fighting and return Israeli hostages held by Hamas, potentially paving the way for a full ceasefire agreement.
But optimistic talk of a deal before the end of the year has faded and it remains unclear how close the two sides are to a deal.
Even as the displaced suffer, Israeli troops are fighting Hamas fighters in the devastated area around the northern towns of Beit Hanoun, Jabalia and Beit Lahiya, which are now cut off from the reach of emergency services because of the fighting.
