From death comes new life
Sabreen Jouda came into the world seconds after her mother left it.
Their home was hit by an Israeli airstrike shortly before midnight on Saturday (local time). Until that moment, the family was like so many other Palestinians trying to shelter from the war in Gaza’s southernmost city of Rafah.
Sabreen’s father was killed. Her 4-year-old sister was killed. Her mother was killed.
But emergency responders learned that her mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, was 30 weeks pregnant. In a rush at the Kuwaiti hospital where the bodies were taken, medical workers performed an emergency caesarean section.
Little Sabreen was near death herself, fighting to breathe. Her tiny body lay in the recovery position on a small piece of carpet as medical workers gently pumped air into her open mouth. A gloved hand tapped at her chest.
She survived.
Yesterday, in the hours after the airstrike, she whimpered and wriggled inside an incubator at the nearby Emirati hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. She wore a diaper too big for her and her identity was scrawled in pen on a piece of tape around her chest: “The martyr Sabreen al-Sakani’s baby.”
But she is not alone. “Welcome to her. She is the daughter of my dear son. I will take care of her. She is my love, my soul. She is a memory of her father. I will take care of her,” said Ahalam al-Kurdi, her paternal grandmother. She clutched her chest and rocked with grief.