a baby girl rescued from the womb after her mother was fatally injured by a Israeli airstrike on Gaza died less than a week after her mother in one of the war-torn Palestinian territories, CBS News has learned. Sabreen Erooh died late Thursday, five days after doctors performed an emergency caesarean section on her mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, who died as doctors frantically pumped oxygen into her daughter's underdeveloped lungs.
Al-Sakani was only six months pregnant when she was killed. Her husband Shoukri and their other daughter, three-year-old Malak, were also killed in the first of two Israeli attacks on homes in the southern part of the country. Gaza city of Rafah on Saturday. At least 22 people, mostly children, were killed in the strikes, according to The Associated Press.
Images of Sabreen Erooh's small, pink body, limp and barely alive, being wrapped in a blanket by a hospital reinforced international condemnation of Israeli tactics in Gaza, which the enclave's Hamas-led Health Ministry says are more killed more than 34,000 people. most of them women and children.
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Baby Sabreen's uncle, Rami al-Sheikh, who had offered to care for the little girl, told the AP on Friday that she had died on Thursday after five days in an incubator.
“We were crazy attached to this baby,” he told the AP at his niece's grave in a cemetery in Rafah.
“God had taken something from us, but given us something in return,” the survival of the premature girl, he said, “but 1714383789 he took them all. My brother's family has been completely wiped out. It has been removed from the civil registry. No trace of him was left behind.”
“This is beyond warfare,” said the head of the United Nations Human Rights Organization Volker Turk said this on Tuesday. 'Every ten minutes a child is killed or injured [in Gaza]… They are protected by the laws of war, and yet they are the ones who disproportionately pay the highest price in this war.”
The little girl had no name at the time and was initially given a label on her small arm that read: 'The baby of the martyr Sabreen al Sakani.' She was named Sabreen Erooh by her aunt, meaning 'soul of Sabreen', after her mother. According to the newspaper, she weighed just 3.1 pounds when she was born BBC.
'These children were sleeping. What have they done? What was their fault?' said a family member, Umm Kareem, after the weekend strikes. “Pregnant women at home, children sleeping, the man's aunt is 80 years old. What did this woman do? Did she fire missiles?”
The Israeli military said the attacks targeted Hamas infrastructure and fighters in Rafah. The political leaders of the IDF and Israel have repeatedly insisted that they will take all possible measures to prevent civilian casualties, but they have pledged to complete their stated mission to destroy Hamas in response to the militant group's October 7 terrorist attack .
As part of that mission, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhau has pledged to order his forces to conduct a ground operation in Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians have reportedly sought refuge from the war. The IDF has regularly hit the city with airstrikes targeting Hamas ahead of the expected operation.
The US has urged Israel to take a more targeted approach in its war against Hamas, joining a number of other Israeli allies and humanitarian organizations in warning against launching a full-scale ground offensive in Rafah.
