Opinion What Is Happening to Mothers and Babies in Gaza Should Leave Us Deeply, Collectively Ashamed

A Palestinian woman and her baby in eastern Gaza after Israeli airstrikes last March. Credit: Bashar Taleb/AFP

As a physician, I am trained to expect differences in health outcomes between populations. I was not trained to witness a collapse so profound that maternal mortality regresses by decades within a generation. Maternal and infant outcomes from the river to the sea are sickeningly graded.

Most Jewish women in Israel enjoy (or are subjected to, depending on one's point of view) extensive prenatal testing, a risk-averse approach to birth, and some of the best maternal and infant outcomes in the world. A system of well-baby clinics guides mothers through the first months and years of life, providing basic screening and routine immunizations.

This impressive system begins to fray when other Israeli citizens are considered, including Palestinian citizens of Israel and ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Outcomes are poorer, prenatal oversight is less consistent, and births are more complicated.

Babies in incubators at Khan Yunis' Nasser Hospital in southern Gaza last month. Credit: Ramadan Abed/Reuters

Further along the gradient are Palestinian women in the West Bank. There, high-quality health care can be purchased, but access is deeply unequal. As I have seen in my work as a physician, if a pregnant woman lives in a village with limited medical infrastructure, the outcome of her pregnancy may depend not on medicine but on the opening hours of Israeli military checkpoints or the sudden absence of health workers due to army operations or settler violence.

Young pregnant women in Gaza today face severe nutritional deprivation, inadequate shelter and unsafe water. Depending on the season, they endure extreme heat or cold and damp conditions. Pregnancy and childbirth in Gaza have been transformed from physiological processes into daily fights for survival.

Mothers are more likely to die from postpartum hemorrhage, infection or untreated obstetric complications. Infants face death from malnutrition, exposure, preventable disease, or the absence of even the most basic medical support. A recent analysis in The Lancet describes a catastrophic deterioration in maternal and neonatal outcomes under these conditions.

Research conducted in Israel itself has shown that even under vastly better circumstances, war exacts a measurable toll. A multicenter Israeli study found that pregnant women exposed to wartime stress experienced increased rates of premature rupture of membranes, gestational diabetes and postpartum hemorrhage. (Bitan et al. in BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth, 2025.)

Other studies similarly show elevated risks of preterm birth and low birth-weight during wars and fighting. Crucially, these findings emerged from fully functioning medical centers among women with consistent prenatal care, stable housing and access to emergency obstetric services.

A woman and her child in Gaza as Palestinians flee ahead of Israeli tanks in November 2023. Credit: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters

Under the unrelenting conditions of war in Gaza – displacement, hunger, insecurity and the destruction of the health care system – these risks are magnified exponentially. Available evidence suggests that maternal mortality in Gaza is now approaching levels last seen three decades ago, worse than in many other contemporary war zones.

Human life is remarkably resilient, and fetuses are biologically primed for survival. But pregnancy is only the beginning of the mother-infant journey. After birth, even a healthy newborn requires adequate nutrition, warmth, hygiene, safety and consistent caregiving.

In Gaza, mothers often lack sufficient food to produce breast milk. Diapers are scarce. Families live in tents exposed to the rain, cold and heat. The absence of these basic conditions dramatically increases the risk of death from infection or malnutrition in the first fragile weeks of life.

Vaccination coverage illustrates the broader collapse. Despite extraordinary efforts by UNICEF and the World Health Organization, immunization rates in Gaza have fallen to around 70 percent from 90 percent before the war.

The scale and duration of the war in Gaza have created living conditions that are incompatible with health or dignity. The population has endured levels of physical destruction and psychological trauma that defy comprehension. Women and their babies – universally noncombatants – bear a disproportionate share of this suffering.

Their fate offers a stark moral diagnosis of the situation in Gaza: a preventable humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in full view of the world. If we measure societies by how they protect the most vulnerable, then what is happening to mothers and babies in Gaza should leave us deeply, collectively ashamed.

Lucy Aitchison is a primary care physician and teacher who volunteers with Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) and the Public Commission Against Torture in Israel (PCATI).