‘Like a dream’: Gaza mother reunited with evacuated baby daughter

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Lucy WilliamsonBBC Middle East correspondent, Jerusalem

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BBC

Mother and daughter had been separated for more than two years

At least eight children, evacuated from Gaza as premature babies in the early weeks of the war, have returned from Egypt and been reunited with relatives.

The toddlers were among more than 30 severely ill new-borns in incubators, who were evacuated from Gaza’s Shifa Hospital in November 2023, amid heavy fighting.

The hospital complex had earlier been occupied by Israeli forces on the grounds, they said, that it was being used by Hamas.

More than two years later, Sundus al-Kurd, one of the parents waiting for the children’s arrival at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis today, said her daughter’s return left her “torn between fear and joy” as she worried that she would not be accepted as a parent after so long apart.

Clutching a pink-embroidered dress for her daughter, Bisan, she described to the BBC how she had tried to take her new-born baby out of Shifa hospital after Israeli forces occupied it, but was told that she could not be moved from her incubator.

It was almost a year, she says, before she knew what had happened to her.

“I lived between despair and hope that my daughter might still be alive,” she told the BBC. “Months later, we heard in the news that premature infants had died in Shifa. I would look at the photos, trying to feel, as a mother, whether this could be my child or not.”

After nearly a year, she says, her daughter was reported alive and well in an Egyptian field hospital, identified by the pink bracelet she had been given immediately after birth.

Sundus, who says she had already lost another child, her parents and her brother by the time Bisan was born, told the BBC that the idea her daughter was alive was “like a dream”.

WHO

More than 30 new-borns were evacuated from Shifa in November 2023

The return of these toddlers is a small triumph in the limited stream of benefits brought by the Gaza ceasefire imposed by US President Donald Trump. But six months on from that ceasefire agreement, Gaza’s future is uncertain, stuck in a fractured limbo between war and peace.

The territory is still divided, with Israeli forces in temporary control of roughly half of Gaza, and Hamas reportedly deepening its grip – politically and practically – in the remaining area, where the vast majority of Gaza’s population still live amid landscapes of rubble.

Reconstruction and the withdrawal of Israeli forces is linked in the Trump plan to Hamas’s disarmament, and there are few signs of progress on this critical stage of the deal.

Nikolay Mladenov, appointed as high representative to liaise with Gaza’s administration under the Trump plan, said at the UN last week that the choice was for “renewed war or a new beginning” in Gaza.

But a Palestinian official close to Hamas told the BBC that he expected the group to reject the disarmament proposals it had received.

With Israel now fighting new wars in Lebanon and Iran, attention has drained away from Gaza, but the lessons it holds are more relevant than ever – about the challenges that follow Israel’s conflicts, and the difficulties it has had in leveraging military might into sustainable peace.

Middle East

Israel-Gaza war