Breastfeeding mothers in Gaza are struggling to produce milk for their children as bombs continue to rain down and formula milk runs out in the besieged Palestinian enclave.
Nedaa Abu Rsas, 29, says she has difficulties feeding her four-month-old baby boy, Yazan.
“I am not producing enough milk for him. Most of the time he is crying,” she says from where she is staying in a flat in Rafah with 13 other family members, including five children.
Her brother and his wife also have a newborn baby who is one month old. Both mothers are not producing enough breast milk.
Ms Abu Rsas brought two cans of formula milk from her home before she fled south, but that is running out. They don’t know when or if aid trucks will bring any more.
Even if they do, they are not near any UN shelters which is where the aid is distributed, says Ms Abu Rsas’s mother, Salwa el-Tibi, 55.
“When the two cans are finished we will face big problems with feeding the two babies,” she adds.
There are also water shortages, which are making them worry about how they will make the baby formula, as well as wash and sterilise the bottles.
“Even before the war, 97 per cent of water in Gaza was polluted and dirty – imagine now,” says Ms el-Tibi, who is the Gaza programme representative for Care International.
The UN Population Fund estimates that 50,000 women are pregnant in Gaza, and 5,522 are expected to deliver in the next month, which is more than 180 births per day. But with medical facilities closing down, food and water shortages, as well as diseases rapidly spreading, mothers and newborns are at a heightened risk.
Usually Ms Abu Rsas lives in the north governorate of the Gaza Strip, along with her husband and two-year-old daughter Nalya, close to the Jabalia refugee camp, which was bombed by Israeli forces earlier this week.
Her husband has received a call saying their home has been damaged. “I don’t know where I will go – half of my house is totally damaged. I can’t go back there,” she says.
The family have been displaced four times since the beginning of the war on 7 October.
“It’s very hard for me as a mother, I have been displaced from my home. I had to walk more than a kilometre to reach the shelter in Al Shifa Hospital while there was shelling all around me,” Ms Abu Rsas adds.
“I was carrying my four-month-old baby in one hand and my daughter in the other, who was crying for the whole time.
“Both of them are crying all night. It’s very hard for them, especially Nalya – at night she wakes up and is crying and screaming. If she hears any bombing she runs to me and sticks her fingers in her ears.”
Nalya is also refusing to eat, she says. Since the war began they have been living on canned food and haven’t eaten any meat. They have struggled to find bread in Rafah – a staple they would usually eat every day.
The adults and children haven’t showered in 16 days, because there isn’t enough water. “I am crying a lot, I am not sleeping,” Ms Abu Rsas adds.
Despite being in the south – where they were ordered to go by Israeli forces – they still hear air strikes around them.
“We try to sleep during the day, not at night. At night we are listening to the bombing around us. It is impossible to sleep,” says Ms el-Tibi.
Ms Abu Rsas adds that she has heard people talking about the whole population of the Gaza Strip being forcibly displaced to the Egyptian side of Rafah in the coming days. “I hope it will not happen at all but this is what we expect,” she says, as the baby cries in the background.
“I am scared for my children’s future. My hope is that my children live in a safe place and the war stops. I wish to live like other people in the world, in peace.
“In every home people have lost relatives and close friends,” says Ms el-Tibi.
She called for long-term psychosocial support for everyone living in the Gaza Strip.
“We have faced a lot of wars and a lot of aggression in Gaza but nothing like this one. This is the hardest. It is the first time we have faced a war like this.”
