Image Credit: Mohammed Omer, Rafah Today 2007-02-26.
'Perhaps those newborn babies will enjoy a safe and unoccupied Palestine'
Rafah Today via BBSNews 2007-02-26 -- By Mohammed Omer. A 25 year old mother lies down, recovering after giving birth to quintuplets, a highlight of Gazan news amidst the internal family disputes occurring in the Khan Younis refugee Camp in the southern part of the Gaza Strip.
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Khan Younis quintuplets, four boys and a girl.
Image Credit: Mohammed Omer, Rafah Today 2007-02-26. |
In Al Shifa’s Cesarean department, Laila Abu Nofal delivered four baby boys and a fifth unexpected gift: a baby girl.
Mohammed Nofal, the 28 year old father of the newborn babies, mentions in an interview that while his wife had taken hormone treatments to get pregnant, they never expected to have five babies at once.
The five babies cause a commotion in Al Shifa’s maternity ward, where the newborns lie side by side, five new heads in a line. This brings to mind a similarly phenomenal event last year, when a woman had six babies in the same Gaza Strip hospital.
Mohammed Nofal mentioned that he already has one five year old girl and another six year old boy. When asked if they had named the newborns yet, he replied that everyone in the family had chosen names for the five infants, deciding upon: Mohammed, Ahmed, Hussam, Abdullrahman, and Iman, for the baby girl.
The crucial question remains whether Mohammed Nofal will be able to raise their five new babies, especially as they will require special care. Mohammed works as a policeman in Gaza, and like the rest of Palestinians working for the Palestinian Authority, he has not received his salary for many months, since sanctions were imposed by the US, Israel and the EU. Even if he is receiving his salary, $460 is not enough money for milk and other expenses for all his children. He wonders how he is going to raise his quintuplets, when, additionally, his parents also need help.
Only if the sanctions imposed on Palestinians by the international community are lifted will the challenge of providing for his extensive family become more feasible. The extreme poverty of most Palestinians in Gaza is so severe that in addition to the lifting of the sanctions, humanitarian funding is necessary, so that the new born babies can count on a bottle of milk, and malnourished children throughout the Strip can avoid irreparable damage.
On one side of Gaza, in Gaza City, new babies are born; but in Khan Younis, another five people were killed in a family dispute. And, according to Nasser hospital in Khan Younis, another 45 Palestinians were injured.
Everyday, people are killed in the Gaza Strip, but people are still getting married, despite the grave situation; people are still having children, as all believe this appalling situation can’t last forever. Perhaps those newborn babies will enjoy a safe and unoccupied Palestine. But only if ‘civilized’ countries want them to; only if the international community truly wakes up and takes decisions to end the embargo on Palestinians, restore our right to earning a livelihood, and compensate the great losses we have suffered as a result both of the sanctions and Israel’s ban on fishing and exporting.
Mohammed Omer is a young journalist/photographer in the Gaza Strip. He and his family have a very rough time in living day to day and they have lost much. In October of 2003, one of Mohammed's younger bothers, Issam, was injured and had to have a leg amputated. Later in the same month another younger brother, Hussam Al-Mouhagir, was killed in his home; shot to death by the Israeli Army that occupies and regularly devastates Palestine. These stories are written by Mohammed who knows no peace, only the continued devastation forced upon civilians who have little voice in the world. Mohammed has covered the Occupied Territories for several years. In 2006 Mohammed won the New American Media National Ethnic Media Award for best Youth Voice. Visit Mohammed's Web site, or write to him to get a more complete picture of what is really happening that main-stream news sources rarely brings to its audience. We are proud to feature articles from Mohammed Omer here at BBSNews, his reporting is some of the only original, on the ground reporting available from the Israeli Occupied Territories.
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