Jerusalem:

Shortly before their first birthday, the triplets that Hanane Bayouk, originally from Gaza, gave birth to in Jerusalem before the war, have seen their mother only once and now fears that she will “die without them.”

The 26-year-old had to return to the Palestinian territory alone after giving birth to Najoua, Nour and Najmeh on August 24, 2023, because her Israeli travel permit had expired.

After seven years of painful IVF procedures, Bayouk was granted permission to leave Gaza and give birth to her child at the annexed Al-Maqased Hospital in East Jerusalem.

She was able to catch a glimpse of her children in the incubators “barely an hour and a half” before she returned to Gaza after her residency permit “expired and the hospital told me to leave.”

Bayouk was due to return in early October after her daughters spent several weeks in incubators, which were in short supply in Gaza hospitals even before the war between Israel and Hamas broke out last October.

Far away from war

Two days after she applied for a new exit permit on October 5, Hamas commandos broke through the Erez Terminal, the only entry point from Gaza to Israel.

Once in Israel, the terrorists carried out an unprecedented attack in which 1,198 people, mostly civilians, were killed, according to a count by the AFP news agency based on official Israeli figures.

According to the Health Ministry of the Hamas-controlled Gaza area, 40,265 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military retaliation campaign. However, the ministry did not provide figures on civilian and operational deaths. The United Nations Office for Human Rights says most of the dead were women or children.

Like Bayouk, Heba Idriss was surrounded by war and could not return to Jerusalem to pick up her only daughter, Saida, who had been born prematurely in the Maqased two months earlier.

The 27-year-old had hoped to return her newborn to her husband Saleh at their home in Shujaiya in the northern Gaza Strip.

Instead, the couple was displaced nine times by Israeli air strikes or evacuation orders, and her husband Saleh has only seen pictures of Saida.

“I want to see my daughter. I am so sorry about being separated from her,” she said tearfully.

Hanane Bayouk was also displaced from her home and now lives in a camp for displaced persons in the south, where she shares a tent with seven of her in-laws.

“It’s driving me crazy. It took so long to get pregnant and now I cry all the time,” she told AFP on a rare day she got through on Gaza’s battered phone network.

“Sometimes I think I want my daughters to return to Gaza before I die because I never kissed them, but then I pull myself together and tell myself it’s better for them to be safe, far away from the war,” she said.

At Maqased Hospital, Hatem Khammach, head of the neonatal intensive care unit, says that under normal circumstances there would not have been enough space to keep Nour, Najmeh and Najoua there for so long.

I cry every time

But the number of births at the hospital has dropped sharply as Israel has stopped issuing travel permits to mothers from Gaza and has drastically reduced the number of permits for mothers from the occupied West Bank.

As more and more checkpoints are closed, it is difficult even for people with residency permits to receive specialist medical treatment in Jerusalem.

“Before the war, we had seven or eight Gaza babies in our unit, even though we can accommodate 30 babies at a time,” says Khammach.

No one has come since October, “and many sick people from the West Bank cannot reach us.”

But the hospital’s medical staff have their hands full – including those who call Bayouk so she can talk to her three daughters.

“My husband can’t do it. I do it and cry every time we hang up. I’m afraid my daughters will grow up not knowing me,” Bayouk said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)