According to footage from Egyptian television and a Palestinian hospital doctor, a group of twenty-eight premature babies from Gaza were evacuated on Monday from a hospital inside the heavily bombed Palestinian enclave into Egypt to receive treatment.
Medical personnel were observed carefully removing infants from ambulances on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing and putting them in transportable incubators before wheeling the them across a parking lot in the direction of other ambulances.
The infants, who were among the 31 relocated on Sunday as a first step toward evacuation from the besieged Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City to a maternity hospital in southern Gaza, were dressed in only diapers and tiny green hats.
“The babies arrived to me from Al Shifa Hospital. They were in a catastrophic condition when they got here,” said Dr Mohammad Salama, head of the neonatal unit at the Al-Helal Al-Emairati Hospital in Rafah, southern Gaza.
“Some were suffering from malnutrition, others from dehydration and some from low temperatures. We have worked in order to make their conditions stable during the past 24 hours,” he told Reuters by telephone.
“As soon as we got the call to prepare the babies, we got them prepared and ready to travel.”
According to Salama, some of the babies were with their mothers, while medical personnel accompanied the babies who were alone and did not have family. According to him, consent forms for the transfer were signed by other relatives in certain cases where the mothers were missing or deceased.
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