Picture this: you are seven months pregnant, nesting in full swing. You’ve arranged tiny socks by color, debated swaddle blankets, maybe even practiced breathing techniques. Now imagine that instead of timing contractions, you’re timing missile strikes. Instead of a hospital bag, you pack an evacuation bag. And your birth plan has one non negotiable item: don’t die.

This isn’t dystopian fiction. This is Hadeel Al Gherbawi’s reality, a 26 year old Gazan mother whose son Jawad entered the world amidst rubble and whose second child will inherit a legacy of trauma. While Western mothers fret over organic onesies, Hadeel worried whether the hospital would mistake her living baby for a corpse if bombs hit during delivery. That’s not hyperbole. She gave birth at al Shifa hospital, where hallways doubled as morgues and body parts were stored in barrels.

Let’s sit with that for a moment. The place where life begins became a warehouse for death. The smell of amniotic fluid mingled with the stench of decay. Nurses who should’ve been monitoring fetal heartbeats were triaging shrapnel wounds. This isn’t just a healthcare collapse. It’s a moral autopsy.

War has always ravaged maternal health, but Gaza has become a petri dish of obstetric horror. Consider the indignities stacked like falling bricks: Hadeel avoided drinking water at night because reaching a makeshift toilet in bombarded displacement camps required waking escorts. Postpartum, she endured unmedicated stitches because painkillers vanished like mirages in sand. When insects invaded their tent, she spent nights like a human shield over her newborn, terrified he’d freeze like other infants reportedly had. Then came the cruelest twist: a second pregnancy announced itself in that canvas purgatory. ‘How,’ she asked, ‘do you gestate life while daily rehearsing its extinction?’

We treat maternal healthcare as collateral damage in conflicts, like splinters from the main wreckage. But what Hadeel endured reveals systemic sabotage. Hospitals aren’t accidentally caught in crossfire. They’re targeted precisely because they’re full of vulnerable people guaranteed to elicit despair when destroyed. Every absent prenatal vitamin, every missing fetal monitor, every midwife fleeing bombardment is a calculated erosion of society’s future.

International law theoretically shields pregnant women and medical facilities. The Geneva Conventions might as well be papier mache in modern conflicts. When bombs hit the maternity ward next door during Hadeel’s induced labor, no global court intervened. When Nasser Hospital later became a battleground, no sanctions followed. We’ve normalized obstetric war crimes by another name: ‘complex conflicts.’

The physical toll is measurable: premature births spiking from maternal stress, newborns dying of hypothermia in tents, mothers bleeding out during C sections performed by flashlight. The psychological wounds are sneakier, festering beneath survival mode. Hadeel describes pale skin, hair falling out, silent weeping in the dark. Classic postnatal depression symptoms we lavish with sympathy in peacetime, but in war zones, they’re expected baggage. Of course you’re unraveling. Your whole world did first.

What astonishes isn’t desperation, but resilience. During Gaza’s January 2025 ceasefire, Hadeel trekked north while newly pregnant against medical advice. She needed to see Jawad’s untouched nursery, that shrine to normalcy. For six weeks, they slept under decorations hung before the world ended, pretending enough stability existed to welcome another child. Then the bombs resumed, and the nursery vanished into dust.

These stories aren’t anomalies. Palestinian midwives report delivering babies in candlelit basements, using car battery powered ultrasounds. Mothers ration infant formula with trembling hands, watering it down until it’s barely caloric. Teen girls use menstrual rags as diapers. Each adaptation reveals healthcare’s devolution: from science to improvisation, from prevention to damage control.

Why does this matter to those outside Gaza’s hellscape? Because how societies treat mothers and infants during crisis defines their humanity. We’re collectively failing that test. While agencies debate aid routes, newborns drink contaminated water. While diplomats parse ceasefire terms, postpartum women ration sanitary pads. There’s grotesque irony in birth still happening amid such death. Like flowers pushing through cracked concrete, insisting on life when all circumstances argue against it.

But survival isn’t romantic. Hadeel’s voice cracks describing the guilt: knowing these children didn’t choose this world, that every maternal comfort was stolen before they drew breath. ‘I love details,’ she says of her prewar nesting instinct. Now motherhood means smothering details: which corpses Jawad might see today, how many cancer causing toxins pollute her breast milk, whether another pregnancy could break her spirit entirely.

Solutions exist, if political will materialized. Mobile prenatal clinics in armored vehicles. Airdropped midwifery kits with portable dopplers. Trauma informed psychologists trained for obstetric triage. Most fundamentally: recognizing that harming mothers and babies isn’t unfortunate war fallout, but active destruction of civilization’s root system.

Hadeel’s second child enters a Gaza where 26,000 homes lie destroyed. Where bakeries bake cardboard into bread to stretch flour. Where the average child has seen 10 family members die. Yet she prepares for this birth with fierce tenderness, determined to spare this baby the horrors Jawad endured. It’s an act of rebellion. An insistence that love outlives annihilation.

We must mirror that courage. Supporting maternal health in war zones isn’t charity. It’s humanity’s immune response against our worst impulses. Every child born under bombs deserves caretakers who don’t avert their eyes. Hadeel mothers in darkness so profound it could swallow stars. Our job is to pass her the light.