Premature baby girl rescued from dead mother's womb dies in Gaza

A premature Palestinian infant, rescued from her mother's womb shortly after the woman was killed in an Israeli air strike, has died, her uncle said.

Sabreen Jouda died in a Gaza hospital on Thursday after her health deteriorated and medical teams were unable to save her, said her uncle on Friday, Rami al-Sheikh.

Sabreen's home in the southern Gaza city of Rafah was hit by an Israeli air strike shortly before midnight Saturday. Her parents and four-year-old sister were killed.

First responders took the bodies to a nearby hospital, where medical workers performed an emergency cesarean section on her mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, who was 30 weeks' pregnant. The infant was kept in an incubator in a neonatal intensive care unit at another hospital until she died five days later.

Al-Sheikh told The Associated Press that Sabreen was buried next to her father on Thursday.

"We were attached to this baby in a crazy way," he said, speaking near Sabreen's grave in a cemetery in Rafah.

"God had taken something from us but given us something in return" with the baby surviving after her family died, he said.

"But (now) he has taken them all. My brother’s family is completely wiped out. It's been deleted from the civil registry. There is no trace of him left behind.”

Israel's brutal Gaza war

More than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israel's Gaza war, according to local health officials, who say about two-thirds of the dead are women and children.

Israel declared war on Gaza and unleashed a pulverizing air and ground offensive in Gaza in response to the Hamas October 7 attack on southern Israel.

The Hamas-led blitz killed about 1,200 people in Israel and the Palestinian resistance factions took 250 Israelis hostage.

More than half of Gaza's 2.3 million people have sought refuge in Rafah, where Israel has conducted near-daily raids as it prepares for a possible offensive in the city.