Her Story
Gaza's midwives deliver seventy babies a day in ruined wards
Her StoryGraphic: Times of Palestine
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An estimated 150 babies are born in Gaza every day, and midwives are delivering more than seventy of them, the UN Population Fund says, in maternity wards stripped of equipment and staff.
UNFPA counts one in four pregnant women in Gaza at heightened risk of dying in childbirth, a rate the agency attributes to the compounding effect of the siege, poverty, a collapsed health system and gender inequality rather than any single cause. Its midwives describe stabilising mothers through severe haemorrhage and obstructed labour, then performing basic neonatal resuscitation with equipment that is often missing entirely.
What the count looks like from inside a ward#
UNFPA has distributed reproductive-health kits it says have supported safe births for more than 20,000 women in Gaza since the war began, and it has trained and deployed hundreds of midwives to reach women who cannot get to a functioning clinic or hospital. The agency's own dispatches describe midwives themselves displaced, working double shifts, and in at least one documented case delivering a family member's baby between rounds.
"Bonded for life."
UNFPA, describing a midwifery student in Gaza who delivered her own baby sister between shifts
The practice, not just the numbers#
Home births have risen as hospital capacity has shrunk, midwives report, shifting risk onto women who would otherwise have delivered under monitoring for haemorrhage or breech presentation. Caesarean capacity is concentrated in the few hospitals with functioning operating theatres and reliable fuel for their generators.
Postnatal follow-up, and the basic obstetric drugs it depends on — oxytocin, magnesium sulfate, antibiotics — move through the same restricted supply lines as the rest of Gaza's medicine.
What the midwives say comes next#
UNFPA's midwives frame the next practical stage plainly: restored supply lines for reproductive-health kits and obstetric drugs, functioning operating theatres outside the handful now carrying the load, and enough midwives rotated off exhaustion to keep the seventy-a-day rate from becoming a death rate. None of it, the agency says, requires anything Gaza's health system did not have before the war destroyed it.
