A baby girl saved from the womb after his mother was mortally wounded by a Israeli airstrike in Gaza has died in a besieged hospital in the war-torn Palestinian territory less than a week after her mother, CBS News has learned. Sabreen Erooh died Thursday afternoon, five days after doctors performed an emergency C-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 her other daughter, three-year-old Malak, were also killed in the first of two Israeli strikes that hit homes in the south. Gaza the city of Rafah on Saturday. At least 22 people died in the strikes, mostly children, according to The Associated Press.
Images of Sabreen Erooh's tiny pink body, limp and barely alive, being rushed through a hospital wrapped in a blanket intensified international condemnation of Israel's tactics in Gaza, which the Ministry of Health of Hamas of the enclave have killed more than 34,000 people. mostly women and children.
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Baby Sabreen's uncle, Rami al-Sheikh, who had volunteered 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 attached to this baby in a crazy way,” she told the AP near her niece's grave in a cemetery in Rafah.
“God had taken something from us, but He gave us something in return” the premature girl's survival, she said, “but 1714138093 he has taken them all. My brother's family is completely gone. It has been removed from the civil registry. No trace of him remains.”
“This is beyond war,” UN human rights chief Volker Turk said on Tuesday. “Every 10 minutes a child is killed or injured [in Gaza]… They are protected by the laws of war, and yet they are the ones who are disproportionately paying the ultimate price in this war.”
Without a name at the time, the little girl initially had a tag on her little arm that read, “The baby of the martyr Sabreen al Sakani.” She was named Sabreen Erooh by her aunt, which means “soul of Sabreen”, after her mother. When he was born, he weighed just 3.1 pounds, according to the BBC.
“These children were sleeping. What did they do? What was their fault?” a relative of the family, Umm Kareem, said after the weekend strikes. “Pregnant women at home, sleeping children, the husband's aunt is 80 years old. What did this woman do? Did she fire missiles?”
The Israel Defense Forces said they were targeting Hamas infrastructure and fighters in Rafah with the strikes. The IDF and Israel's political leaders have repeatedly insisted they are taking all possible steps to avoid civilian casualties, but have vowed to complete their stated mission to destroy Hamas in response to the militant group's October 7 terror attack.
As part of that mission, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to order his forces to carry out a ground operation in Rafah, where more than 1 million Palestinians are believed to have sought refuge from the war. The IDF has hit the city with regular airstrikes, targeting Hamas, he says, ahead of this planned operation.
The United States has urged Israel to take a more targeted approach in its war against Hamas and, along with a number of other Israeli allies and humanitarian organizations, has warned against launching a large-scale ground offensive in Rafah.
