A hospital in the Gaza Strip, scene of a nine-month war between Israel and the Palestinian movement Hamas, has saved a fetus from the womb of a pregnant Palestinian woman who was killed after an Israeli attack.
• Read more: Israel-Palestine war: More than 38,000 killed in 10 months, according to Hamas
The woman, who is nine months pregnant, was among at least 24 victims – according to the Palestinian Authority’s emergency services – in a series of airstrikes overnight from Friday to Saturday.
According to an official at Al-Awda Hospital, he was seriously injured during a raid in the center’s Nausirat camp, and two women and a child died.
She died of her injuries at the hospital, Dr Raed Al-Saudi, head of the gynecology-obstetrics department at Al-Awda, told AFP: “After her death, doctors performed an ultrasound to check the condition of the fetus and noted the heartbeat,” before calling in the surgeons, he said.
Emergency surgeon Dr Akram Hussain confirmed that the latter “immediately performed caesarean section and extracted the fetus”. “The child is fine and has been transferred to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the neighboring city of Deir el-Bala,” he added.
Also injured in the blast, the father of the newborn, “a boy”, Dr Hussain said, was shifted to the same hospital.
The Israeli military said in a statement on Saturday that it had “eliminated a (specified) number of terrorists in several clashes” in the Gaza Strip, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu estimated earlier in the week that his country “needs to increase further”. Military pressure on Hamas.
Hamas said in a statement that Israeli bombings had killed around 30 people in the past 24 hours.
The Islamist movement sees it as Israel’s “response” to the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) opinion on Israeli colonialism on Friday.
The UN’s top court has ruled Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories since 1967 “illegal”, described as “historic” by the Palestinians and “wrong” by Israel.
The war, sparked by Hamas’ unprecedented attack on southern Israel on Oct. 7 in the Gaza Strip, has left 1,195 dead, the majority civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data.
In response, an Israeli military offensive devastated the Gaza Strip, where at least 38,919 people were killed, most of them civilians, according to data from the Health Ministry of the Hamas-led Gaza government.
