A premature Palestinian baby, identified as Sabreen Jordan, rescued from her dying mother’s womb has died five days after been saved in Gaza.
According to AFP, her uncle Rami al-Sheikh, said Friday, noting that the girl died in a hospital on Thursday after her health deteriorated following five days in an incubator.
Sabreen Jouda was rescued from her mother’s womb shortly after both of her parents were killed in an Israeli airstrike on the southern city of Rafah on Sunday.
The dead bodies of a 30-week pregnant woman, her husband and their 4-year-old daughter were extracted from the rubble after an IDF airstrike around midnight on Sunday.
Doctors were said to have performed an emergency caesarian and kept the baby in an incubator in an neonatal intensive care unit.
Five-day-old Sabreen is among more than 34,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza during Israel’s conflict with Hamas, which was sparked by a Hamas massacre in southern Israel on October 7 last year. The militants killed over 1,200 people and took around 250 people hostage.
During a two-hour session on Thursday, the Israeli cabinet agreed to reduce its demand for Hamas to release the first group of hostages from 40 to 20 people. The condition is that all those released must be women, children, elderly, or wounded, according to Israeli media reports on Friday.
The number and identities of the hostages to be freed first were a major sticking point in the talks. Hamas refused to release the list of surviving hostages, leading to concerns that many of them may already be deceased.
Israel is expected to announce a cease-fire following the release of the first group, and its length will depend on the eventual number of hostages released, according to public broadcaster Kan.
Israeli officials on Friday are hosting the intelligence chief of Egypt who is arriving in Tel Aviv to discuss efforts to jump-start the hostage talks.
On Tuesday, the first day after a week-long Passover holiday, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will arrive in Israel on a similar mission.
The Israeli public is getting increasingly impatient with what may see as a failure on the government’s part to bring back the hostages.
Dozens of protesters on Friday morning rallied outside the house of Benny Gantz, a key member of Mr Netanyahu’s government, demanding that he step down if he fails to push through a deal to release the hostages.
