A 20-day-old infant has died from extreme cold in the Gaza Strip, marking the fifth death from hypothermia in the Palestinian enclave besieged by Israeli forces in the past six days.
The Gaza Health Ministry said in a statement that Jumaa Al-Batran died on Sunday, while his twin brother Ali remained in intensive care at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital.
Jumaa’s father, Yahya al-Batran, said his son woke up on Sunday to find his head “as cold as ice.”
He said the twins were born a month early and spent just one day in a nursery at a hospital in Deir El Bala. Like other health centers in the Gaza Strip, the hospital is overwhelmed and only partially functional due to relentless Israeli bombing.
He said doctors told the mothers to keep the babies warm, but the babies were living in tents and nighttime temperatures regularly dropped below 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit). , that was impossible.
“There are eight of us, but we only have four blankets,” Albatran said as she cradled her son’s pale body. He explained that dew drops seeped through the tent cover all night.
“It’s cold, look at his color. Can you see how frozen he is?” Al-Batran’s family took shelter in a dilapidated tent in the city of Deir el-Balah in central Gaza. He said he is doing so.
“There is no electricity. The water is cold, there is no gas, there is no heat, there is no food. …My children are dying in front of my eyes and no one cares. I’m worried that Mr. Ali will follow suit.”
The children, some of them barefoot, stood outside and watched Yahya grieve. The infant wrapped in cloth was placed at the Imam’s feet, barely larger than a shoe. After praying, the Imam took off his ankle-length coat and wrapped it around his father.
Al Jazeera spokesman Hind Khoudary said the area where the Al-Batran family is taking shelter is “very close to the sea and very windy.”
“With no tarps or tents, Jumaa’s father was unable to provide his children with basic necessities,” she said. “Palestinian infants and children are dying not only from air raids and shelling, but also from malnutrition and hypothermia.”
Israeli forces have forcibly evicted nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, forcing tens of thousands to huddle in unsuitable tents along the rain-swept coastline of southern Gaza.
Three of the five Palestinian infants who froze to death within a week lived in the al-Mawasi “humanitarian zone.”
Marwan al-Hamas, director of Gaza’s field hospital, confirmed Jumaa’s death, bringing the number of children who “died due to extreme cold” in recent days to five.
Ahmed Alfalah, a doctor at Al Tahrir Maternity Hospital in Khan Younis, said he sees an average of five to six cases of hypothermia in infants every day.
“I visited the tents where these young children are living and saw the conditions. It’s dire,” Al-Fala told Al Jazeera.
Since the war began last October, Gaza’s residents have been forced from their homes, repeatedly displaced, and endured severe shortages of electricity, drinking water, food and medical services.
The Israeli massacre in Gaza left at least 45,484 Palestinians dead and 108,090 injured. At least 1,139 people were killed and more than 200 captured in Israel in a Hamas-led attack on October 7, 2023.
