All Sa'ida Idris has known almost from the day she was born just over a year ago was the beeping and buzzing of machines and the touch of the rotating staff of nurses and doctors in the neonatal unit of Al Makassed, a Palestinian hospital in the eastern part of the country. Jerusalem.
Sa'ida was born on July 28, 2023 as a premature baby at just 27 weeks of pregnancy. The 14-month-old girl is one of five children who have been hospitalized for the past year and raised by a team of hospital staff and volunteers while her mother and father remain 100 kilometers away in a tent camp in Khan Younis for people displaced by the war in Gaza .
“I was with her a week after she was born,” Sa'ida's mother, Heba Idris, 38, told CBC News freelance cameraman Mohamed El Saif late last month. She and her husband were preparing to video call the hospital, the only way they can communicate with their daughter.
“I feel like something was ripped out of my heart,” she said about being separated from her child. “How to leave a piece of your soul?”
Idris was staying in East Jerusalem on a short-term medical permit due to a difficult pregnancy that required care she could not provide in Gaza.
She says she became depressed shortly after giving birth after having difficulty breastfeeding and returned to Gaza to be with her husband. Sa'ida had to stay at home because her organs were not fully developed and she had to stay in an incubator for another three months.
“She needed mechanical ventilation for a long time,” said Sa'ida's nurse, Imm Amir.
CBC News has agreed to use only the nurse's patronymic name because it fears a public appearance could jeopardize her work permit in Israel.
Fourteen-year-old Sa'ida Idris was born 27 weeks prematurely in a hospital in East Jerusalem. Her mother, Heba Idris, who lives in Gaza, was only able to see her for two months before an October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on southern Israel separated them. Her father hasn't met her yet.
Impossible choice
Idris remembers asking the nurse if she could hold the baby before she left. However, Sa'ida was too small and weak to be removed from the incubator, so her mother could only stroke her hair and reach for her little fingers through the opening in the incubator.
Since then, Idris has visited her daughter only once. A few weeks after giving birth, she was allowed to return to East Jerusalem because doctors wanted her to breastfeed, but by then her milk had run out. She managed to spend four days with Sa'ida before saying goodbye again.
Idris last saw her child on September 4, just over a month before Hamas attacked Israel on October 7.
When the war broke out, Israel stopped allowing Gazans to enter the country, leaving Idris with an impossible choice: take the child back to the war zone or leave her in hospital to be raised under the care of staff and volunteers.
Displacement, unsanitary conditions and lack of fresh, healthy food are just a few of the factors increasing health risks for new or expectant mothers in Gaza as the war between Israel and Hamas rages around them.
“It's hard not being there for her, not being able to touch her hand, play with her, change her clothes, bathe her,” Idris said.
Sa'ida's father, 32-year-old Saleh Idris, has not even met his daughter yet.
“I don't want my daughter to come to Gaza.”
In a statement to CBC News, the Coordination of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) said the parents of five premature babies born before the war at an East Jerusalem hospital were offered the chance to bring them back to Gaza. They undressed after care was completed but chose to leave them in the hospital.” under the supervision of guardians.
Idris says she believes it will be safer for her daughter, who has a weakened immune system, to remain in East Jerusalem.
“I hope I can go to her,” she said. “I don't want my daughter to come to Gaza because of the dirt, tents and sand.”
For the past year, the couple has been using WhatsApp video calls to interact with their daughter, although even such calls are rare as they have to go to a makeshift internet cafe to get a connection strong enough to video call.
Once they connect, they spend most of the conversation trying to get Sa'ida's attention. The child is distracted by toys and his own image on the phone. But every now and then she makes eye contact and giggles as they blow her kisses and try to get her to say “mama” and “baba,” the Arabic word for dad.
“I feel like she sees me, but she doesn't see me,” Idris said. I want to see her face to face and hug her.
Imm Amir, the nurse caring for Sa'ida, claims that she is a sociable child and greets everyone with a smile because “she thinks everyone is her family.”
“She doesn't know her mother,” she said as Sa'ida curled up and slept in her arms with her thumb in her mouth.
Travel from Gaza restricted
Even before Israel's recent war with Hamas, the ability for Palestinians to travel between Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and East Jerusalem was very limited. Since then, traveling across borders has become even more difficult.
“The Palestinians need the consent of Israeli authorities, who maintain control of Gaza's borders,” said Aseel Aburass, director of the Occupied Palestinian Territories unit at Physicians for Human Rights.
Since permit system was established in the early 2000s, Palestinians who needed to leave Gaza for work, medical appointments, or personal reasons such as attending a funeral had to apply for an exit permit.
Aburass said the process of obtaining medical clearance to leave Gaza could take weeks or months. It begins with a medical assessment in Gaza, followed by the submission of an application to the Palestinian Ministry of Health, which is then sent to COGAT, which manages Israel's borders.
“The whole permitting system is very complex and very bureaucratic,” Aburass said. “We call it bureaucratic violence.”
The Hamas-led attack on Israel on October 7 last year and the war that followed hampered this process and medical transfers.
The Erez border crossing in the north, through which Gazans normally entered Israel, was damaged on October 7 and is now closed to all but humanitarian aid trucks. The Rafah border crossing in the south was severely restricted, with the nearby town of Rafah seeing the heaviest fighting.
In August, eleven-year-old Abdul Rahman Abu Al-Jidyan contracted polio. His mother, Nafin, told CBC freelance cameraman Mohamed El Saif in Deir al-Balah that the child's symptoms started with a fever and eventually progressed to paralysis of his left leg.
Before May, the Rafah crossing was jointly controlled by Egypt and Israel. At the time, Aburass says, about 50 patients with exit authorization were leaving the country each day to seek medical care in Israel, Egypt or abroad. According to her, in the five months since Israel took control of the crossing, only 216 patients were able to cross.
“We are not operating under ‘business as usual,’” Aburass said. “The old normal is gone; everything is ad hoc.”
According to COGAT, as of October 7, “for clear security reasons, residents of the Gaza Strip have not been allowed to enter Israel.” However, it says it continues to facilitate the transport of medicines from Gaza.
“Israel stands ready to continue to facilitate and coordinate the departure of the sick and injured to third countries, and even on a larger scale, subject to the consent of those countries,” he said in a statement to CBC News.
Growing up in a hospital room
Back in East Jerusalem, Sa'ida smiles broadly at the adults who care for her.
The room where he spends his time at Al Makassed Hospital has toys and play mats on the floor, but it is still a hospital room. There are cots for her and four other children, but there are monitors, wires and machines above them.
It's a fully functioning neonatal unit, but it's also where Sa'ida spends her childhood.
When the video call with her parents ends, the girl returns to crawling and playing with toys. The nurse tickles her and then moves on to the next child she needs to care for. Sai'da is blissfully unaware of the distance between her mother and father.
In Khan Younis, Sa'ida's father has trouble hanging up on a video call with his daughter. As tears stream down his cheeks, he waves at the screen and tries to get her attention a few more times before the call cuts out.
For a while they were a family again, but now reality sets in as they return to the tent from the internet cafe.
The only thing they can do, they say, is wait: wait for the end of the war, for the separation from their daughter to end, for the beginning of their family life together.
“I wish she was in my arms,” Sa'ida's mother said, wiping away tears. “But due to the difficult circumstances we are living in, I know she is fine.
– It will be better for her there.
