Sila was only 20 days old when her father discovered her, her face blue from the cold. The family lives in a refugee camp in Al-Mawasi, in the southern Gaza Strip, a crowded and flood-affected area, the BBC reports. “The cold is bitter and harsh,” the infant’s father testified to the British media. All night, because of the cold, we huddle together.”
Sila suffered “severe hypothermia, leading to cessation of vital signs, cardiac arrest and ultimately death,” according to Dr. Ahmad al-Farra, the director of the pediatric department at Nasser Hospital where the infant had been taken away.
On December 24, two other children were admitted to hospital for the same reason: a newborn three days old and another less than a month old. Both died, according to the doctor.
“Avoidable tragedies”
Six babies have died of hypothermia in the last two weeks in the Gaza Strip, a figure given by the Hamas Ministry of Health and the Palestinian Wafa news agency. On December 26, after the death of four babies, Unicef spoke of “avoidable tragedies”.
The cause was poor weather conditions, rain and cold, and the precarious conditions in which these newborns lived.
Despite these testimonies reported by several media, on
At night, however, temperatures dropped to 9 degrees on December 24 and 25. On December 27, the minimum was 7°. The other nights between December 23 and January 1, temperatures oscillated between 9 and 12 degrees, according to readings from the El Arish station, located in Egypt, about fifty kilometers south of the Gaza Strip.
-“Floods in the tents”
Claire Nicolet, in charge of operations in Gaza for Médecins sans frontières, confirms these poor conditions with 20 Minutes : “Until December 31, it was raining. There was flooding in the tents, including the tents of medical facilities.” Weather conditions are all the more dramatic as Palestinians displaced by the conflict do not all have access to decent accommodation. “People don’t live in real tents, they live under pieces of fabric. There are also hardly any blankets.”
Claire Nicolet notes that “the big problem is supply. Very few trucks return to Gaza every day, there is no massive arrival of blankets. If we had decent tents and blankets, it would change a lot of things.” According to Unicef, an average of 65 aid trucks were able to return to Gaza each day in November, “a dramatically low figure given the urgent needs of children, women and other civilians,” notes the UN agency.
With the shortage caused by the conflict, triggered following the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023, it is also difficult for displaced people to obtain wood or fuel to keep warm.
Babies can lose heat ‘nearly four times faster than adults’
These conditions make newborns or premature babies particularly vulnerable. The website of the American University of Stanford recalls that babies “can lose heat quickly, almost four times faster than adults”. Infants are more exposed to the risk of hypothermia because “they have a large body surface area in relation to their weight”, emphasize hospitals in the British city of Cambridge. Infants also have “little subcutaneous fat” and “are not capable of shivering.”
50,000 pregnant women
The medical structures to accommodate them are insufficient. According to the latest WHO bulletin, dated December 4, 17 of the 36 hospitals in the Gaza Strip were partially functioning, 37% of the 136 dispensaries were functional, as well as six field hospitals.
Around 50,000 women are pregnant and around 5,500 were due to give birth in December. For these babies, the situation risks still being critical: the month of January is the coldest in Gaza, recalls Claire Nicolet. During the night from Thursday to Friday, temperatures dropped to 4 degrees.
