Living in a tent with premature triplets: how fear and anxiety haunt Gaza’s new mothers
The constant trauma (of the war) took its toll on Yasmeen Khuwaiter, who found out about her pregnancy two weeks before the war, and gave birth to triplets in April, two months before her due date.
When she was in need of treatment in November, she arrived at a hospital to find it closing because of a shortage of medical supplies and electricity. Khuwaiter and her family fled from Gaza City to central Gaza, with her husband having to push her in a wheelchair. Weeks later she had to flee again, to Rafah in the south of the strip.
Doctors referred her for treatment in Egypt, but after a month of waiting to be allowed out of Gaza, the area Khuwaiter was staying in was bombed, forcing the family to flee again to central Gaza, where she gave birth in hospital.
“We returned to live in a tent. A tent that lacked the necessities of human life,” she says. “You can imagine – three premature babies in need of extreme care, living in a tent.”
