How pregnant women are 'greatest victims' of Israel-Hamas conflict

Thoughts and headlines are understandably concerned with the shocking death toll in Gaza – but new lives are also under threat.

Last week, the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said that the number killed in the three months of Israeli bombardment had exceeded 25,000: a casualty rate "without precedent in the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict", said The Associated Press. 

About 7,000 more are "buried under rubble presumed dead", said The Guardian. 

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'Disproportionately bearing the burden'

Women, children and newborns are "disproportionately bearing the burden" of this war, said the World Health Organization (WHO): as of November, they made up about two-thirds of all casualties. 

But when the war broke out after Hamas's massacre on 7 October, about 52,000 women in Gaza were already pregnant. They are among the catastrophe's "greatest victims", said The Washington Post. An estimated 183 of these women are giving birth every day, in unimaginably dire conditions.

"As airstrikes push 1.9 million people into an ever-smaller corner of the besieged enclave, disease is spreading," the paper reported. "Famine is looming and levels of anaemia are so high that the risk of postpartum haemorrhage has soared and breastfeeding is often impossible." 

With more than half of Gaza's hospitals destroyed and the remaining facilities only partially functioning, women are "forced to deliver babies in overcrowded and unclean shelters without medical support", said the charity Care International. Some are giving birth via C-section without anaesthetic – and face a huge risk of infection due to the lack of clean medical tools. 

'Psychological toll of hostilities'

"My experience during childbirth was a nightmare in every sense of the word, or something like a horror film," Wajiha al-Abyad told The New York Times.

During the first 100 days of the war, nearly 20,000 babies were born under these conditions, Unicef reported on 19 January. "That's a baby born into this horrendous war every 10 minutes," a spokesperson told a briefing in Geneva.

The "psychological toll" of hostilities is also having "deadly" consequences, said the WHO, causing a rise in stress-induced miscarriages, premature births and stillbirths. Healthcare workers have reported a 300% increase in miscarriages in Gaza, Nour Beydoun, Care's regional adviser on protection and gender, told Jezebel.

But beyond pregnancy and maternal deaths, women's health is compromised during war. In Gaza, a lack of menstrual hygiene products is causing an increase in infections in women and girls, Beydoun told HuffPost, as they are using unsanitary fabric or clothing while on their periods. 

Women also face the growing threat of what the UN has called "war's oldest, most silenced and least condemned crime": rape. The breakdown of law and order, rising violence and displacement of people make women increasingly vulnerable to rape and sexual assault. Many will also become pregnant as a result.