Gaza doctors deliver baby girl from mother killed in Israeli airstrike

Doctors in Gaza have delivered a baby girl from the womb of her mother who lay dying from injuries sustained in an Israeli airstrike on the southern city of Rafah on Saturday.

Sabreen’s father and her 4-year-old sister were also killed in the attack

When emergency responders learned that her mother was 30 weeks pregnant, doctors at Kuwaiti hospital, where the bodies were taken, performed an emergency caesarean section in a bid to save her.

“She was born in severe respiratory distress. She was quickly brought from the Kuwaiti hospital to the nursery of Tal Al-Sultan Hospital,” said Dr Mohammad Salameh, head of the neonatal intensive care unit at Emirati Maternity Hospital

He added that while her condition was stable and improving, the baby was still at risk and she would have to stay in hospital for three to four weeks.

“This respiratory distress syndrome is caused by premature birth. This child should have been in her mother’s womb at this time, but she was deprived of this right.”

The little girl has been named after her mother. But even if she survives, she was born an orphan.

For the moment, she is in an incubator in the Rafah hospital with the words, "The baby of the martyr Sabreen Al-Sakani" written on tape across her chest.

The baby’s paternal grandmother Mirvat al-Sakani has said she will take care of her.

Palestinian health officials said 19 people died in intensified strikes in Rafah overnight on Saturday to Sunday.

The dead, killed in hits on two houses, included 13 children from one family, they said.

Officials say at least two-thirds of the more than 34 thousand Palestinians killed in the enclave since the war began have been children and women.

Rafah now hosts some 1.5 million people displaced by Israeli bombing.

Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has said a date for a planned ground offensive in Rafah has been set, but it yet to publicly present a plan to protect civilians in the city.