14-month-old lives in East Jerusalem hospital while parents shelter in Gaza
CBC
All Sa'ida Idris has known almost since the day she was born just over a year ago is the beeping and buzzing of machines and the touch of a rotating staff of nurses and doctors in the neonatal unit of Al Makassed, a Palestinian hospital in East Jerusalem.
Sa'ida was born 27 weeks premature on July 28, 2023. The 14-month-old is one of five babies who've been living in the hospital for the past year, raised by a team of hospital staff and volunteers while her mother and father are 100 kilometres away in a tent camp in Khan Younis for those displaced by the war in Gaza.
"I was with her a week from her birth," Sa'ida's mother, Heba Idris, 38, told CBC News freelance videographer Mohamed El Saife late last month. She and her husband were preparing to make a video call to the hospital — the only way they can communicate with their baby daughter.
"It feels like something was torn from my heart," she said of being separated from her child. "How do I leave a piece of my soul?"
Idris was in East Jerusalem on a short-term medical permit because of a difficult pregnancy that required care not available to her in Gaza.
Soon after giving birth, she says she fell into a depression after struggling to breastfeed and returned to Gaza to be with her husband. Sa'ida had to stay behind because her organs weren't fully developed and she needed to remain in the incubator for another three months.
"She needed mechanical ventilation for a long time," said Sa'ida's nurse, Imm Amir.
CBC News has agreed to use only the nurse's patronymic name because she fears speaking publicly could jeopardize her work permit in Israel.
Idris recalled asking a nurse if she could hold her baby before she left. But Sa'ida was too small and weak to be taken out of the incubator, so her mother could only stroke her hair and reach for her little fingers through an opening in the incubator.
Since then, Idris has had only one other visit with her daughter. She was granted a permit to travel back to East Jerusalem a few weeks after the birth because doctors wanted her to breastfeed, but by then, her milk had run dry. She was able to spend four days with Sa'ida before saying yet another goodbye.
Idris last saw her baby on Sept. 4, a little over a month before Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7.
Once the war broke out, Israel stopped allowing Gazans to enter the country, leaving Idris with an impossible choice: bring her baby back to a war zone or leave her in the hospital to be raised by staff and volunteers.
"It's difficult that I'm not there with her, to touch her hand, to play with her, change her, bathe her," Idris said.
Sa'ida's father, Saleh Idris, 32, has yet to even meet his daughter.
