In a southern Gaza hospital, two newborns lie silently side by side, sharing a single incubator amid severe space and supply constraints.
The territory’s youngest residents already face a precarious entry into life, given the dire humanitarian conditions in this war-ravaged enclave bordering Israel and Egypt.
However, for infants requiring specialized care, such as premature babies, the path forward is even more perilous.
“The situation is dire: there is no oxygen available for them, nor are there any spare incubators in the hospital,” stated Hatem Dhahir, head of the neonatal department at Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis.
“We attempt to transfer them to other facilities, but they are perpetually full and the situation remains dire. Most of these children require oxygen and are severely underweight, and conditions continue to deteriorate,” he told AFP.
The conflict between Israel and Hamas has devastated the Palestinian territory’s healthcare system, rendering many medical facilities completely or partially non-operational.
Ongoing Israeli restrictions on goods entering the Gaza Strip mean that medical supplies and specialist equipment are also dwindling.
Israel claims it is blocking items that could have dual military use, accusing Hamas—which orchestrated the deadliest attack against Israel on October 7, 2023—of plotting further violence.
Dhahir stated that Nasser hospital has witnessed a significant increase in premature births, as well as twins and triplets, in recent months.
This influx has forced staff to place two or even three babies in each incubator, he said.
In March, the UN’s humanitarian agency OCHA reported that one in three pregnancies in Gaza were high-risk and that 70 percent of newborns were premature or underweight.
It stated that sharing incubators significantly increases mortality risks.
– ‘No room’ –
Nearly the entirety of Gaza’s population was displaced at least once during the devastating war, triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on Israel.
The fighting flattened large swathes of the territory, left hundreds of thousands living in tents and temporary shelters, and shattered vital infrastructure like sanitation and access to safe water.
Despite a US-backed ceasefire declared in October 2025, the Israeli military continues to target Palestinians it claims are militants.
A UN-mandated inquiry published in June stated that severe shortages of food, medical supplies, and fuel, along with the collapse of healthcare services, had an enormous impact on maternal health.
“Against this background, rates of miscarriage, stillbirth, low-birthweight infants, and congenital defects have increased,” the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry said.
Heart conditions were among three types of congenital defects that had particularly increased, the commission said, citing medical practitioners.
In southern Gaza, Mona Ahmad accompanied a baby taken to Nasser hospital in late August, diagnosed with a serious congenital defect where the heart’s two main blood vessels are switched in position.
“We received a final report stating that the baby was suffering from transposed arteries and needed to be transferred, as there was absolutely no treatment available here,” Ahmad told AFP.
“The baby spent a full week in the neonatal unit and was discharged because there was no room for her,” she added.
In a bid to revive Gaza’s neonatal care system, the UN children’s agency UNICEF has scaled up efforts to supply medical equipment such as incubators, ventilators, and monitors to hospitals.
Including work that began before the ceasefire, UNICEF has supplied 93 incubators to six facilities across the Gaza Strip.
However, challenges remain immense, and more must be done, said Toby Fricker, chief of advocacy and communications for UNICEF Palestine, following a visit to a neonatal intensive care unit in the territory.
For now, “through the sheer resilience of the doctors and people, things are working,” he said.
