The little girl came into the world in the southern Gaza Strip while her mother, as well as her father and little sister, were dying of Israeli bombs. The doctors managed to save her with a cesarean section. Father Francesco Patton: “The strength of life that continues and wishes to prevail over every form of death”
Francesca Sabatinelli – Vatican City
From the same rubble that buried her family, Sabreen Jouda received life, born to a mother hit to death by Israeli bombs who, as the last act of an existence shattered by the fury of war, protected the daughter she was carrying in her womb for thirty weeks. She came into the world, a premature orphan, in Rafah, in the south of the Gaza Strip, a few seconds after the last breath of her mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, killed together with her husband Shoukri and little Malak, aged three, by the bombing , Saturday night, of the house where they had found refuge.
The little girl of a martyr
Sabreen has her mother’s name, a choice of the doctors who performed the caesarean section while the woman was dying in the city’s Kuwaiti hospital. A decision taken quickly: to give birth to the baby at all costs from that now moribund body, with no more brain activity, and which, in a few moments, would also take the fetus with it to the grave. And there, on a piece of carpet, the delicate gloved hands of her medics saved her, gave her breath, pumping air into her little body. On the adhesive tape identifying her we read “the child of the martyr Sabreen al-Sakani”. Her conditions are not stable and she is still at risk, “because she was deprived of the right to be in her mother’s womb”, explain the doctors.
The faults of children
The newborn, whose photos are going around the world, is the face of the tragedy and of all the orphans that this war is producing, around twenty thousand according to Unicef sources. However, she is also a sign of hope: she is the miracle of Gaza. Alongside the images of destruction and death, there are now those of Sabreen Jouda, in the incubator, one of the few still in operation. She will stay there for a few weeks, then she will be looked after by family members, uncles and grandparents, from whom the bombs took away their children and another niece. “What do they have to do with it?”, is the incessant and painful cry that accompanies the 15 thousand children who have died since the beginning of the war.
Patton: Life prevailing over death
The hope is that “that little girl who is born in the midst of a context of death will also be a sign of life for all of Gaza and for all of the Holy Land”, are the words of the Custos of the Holy Land, Father Francesco Patton to whom the image of the little girl born from her dead mother made him reflect on the meaning of “a phrase from the Easter sequence: mors et vita duel conflixere aiming‘death and life have collided, in a prodigious duel’, on the one hand death, on the other however there is all the strength of life that continues and wishes to prevail over every form of death”.
Listen to Father Francesco Patton
