In front of his tent in the central Gaza Strip, Yahya Al-Batran lit a fire to get some warmth with his wife and children amidst the extreme cold, days after his infant child died due to the cold, according to doctors.
He sadly carries the clothes of baby Jumaa, who died in the cold tent in Deir al-Balah, just 20 days after his birth, along with Ali, his twin brother, who is being treated in the intensive care unit of Nasser Hospital in the south of the devastated Strip.
Next to him, his wife, Noura Al-Batran (38 years old), who has not fully recovered after giving birth, cries her child. She says, “We fled the bombing from Beit Lahia, only to die here in the cold.”
She added, “We do not have enough blankets or clothes. I noticed that the boy began to freeze and turned blue, then he died.”
On December 29, the Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip announced Jumah’s death as a result of “severe cold.”
Ali and Juma
The Ministry announced on Monday that the number of children who died from the cold in the Gaza Strip had risen to 7 within a week.
Yahya Al-Batran (44 years old), who is displaced with his wife, children, and disabled parents from Beit Lahia in the north, says that he named the twins Ali and Juma after the names of his nephew and his wife’s nephew, who were martyred in an Israeli bombing during the aggression that has been ongoing for more than 14 months in the Gaza Strip. He adds with a sigh, “We watch our children die.”
Like hundreds of thousands of other residents of the Gaza Strip, members of the Al-Batran family have been displaced more than once. Thousands of families live in tents and in tragic conditions, suffering from a shortage of food, fuel and medicine.
Al-Batran’s tent is in the middle of hundreds of worn-out tents that were erected in an orchard containing dozens of palm trees in Deir al-Balah.
Yahya Al-Batran hugs three of his children on a mat wet with rainwater in a corner of a tent made of blankets and worn-out cloth.
Then he places a small metal pot containing water on the stove to prepare tea, which he then mixes with dry bread, and the family eats it with a little cheese and thyme as a lunch.
His wife said, crying, “My children died from hunger and cold,” adding, “We suffer from malnutrition, cold, and lack of clothing.”
Everything leads to death
In Khan Yunis, south of the Gaza Strip, Mahmoud Al-Fasih narrates that he found his infant daughter, Sela, “frozen from the cold” in his small tent near the seashore in the Al-Mawasi area, to which he fled from Gaza City. He quickly took her to the hospital, but she had died.
Doctor Ahmed Al-Farra told Agence France-Presse that day that the girl, “who was 3 weeks old, arrived at the reception department with a severe drop in temperature that led to the cessation of vital signs, cardiac arrest, and death.”
The 20-day-old baby Aisha Al-Qassas also died due to the extreme cold in the Mawasi Khan Yunis area, according to her family.
The girl’s uncle, Muhammad al-Qassas, says, “In Gaza, everything leads to death. Whoever did not die from the Israeli bombing died from hunger or cold.”
There are hundreds of thousands of displaced people living in improvised and random tents near the seashore in the Al-Mawasi Khan Yunis and Al-Mawasi Rafah areas, which Israel declared a “humanitarian zone.”
Temperatures in the Gaza Strip dropped significantly in December, and the winter season in the Strip is generally accompanied by heavy rains.
The government media in the Gaza Strip warned in a statement on Monday “of the impact of a highly effective depression in the coming hours and days,” noting that it constitutes “a real threat to two million displaced people,” most of whom live in tents.
Dr. Ahmed Al-Farra, Director of the Emergency and Children’s Department at Nasser Hospital, warns of “the death of larger numbers of children, infants, and the elderly.”
He added, “Life in tents is dangerous because of the cold and the scarcity of energy and heating sources.”