Three infants in a Gaza refugee camp freeze to death

Ahmed al-Farra, director of the children’s ward at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, confirmed the death of three-week-old Sila Mahmoud al-Faseeh on Wednesday, adding that two other babies, aged three days and one month, had been brought to the hospital over the previous 48 hours after dying of hypothermia.
In an interview with Al Jazeera, al-Farra referred to Sila's death by saying, "She was in good health and she was born naturally, but because of the severe cold in the tents there was a significant decrease in temperature which made her bodily system stop working and led to her death."

The family had been living in "bad conditions" in their tent at al-Mawasi, a region of dunes and farmland on Gaza's Mediterranean coast near the southern town of Khan Younis, according to Mahmoud al-Faseeh, the father of baby Sila.

Al-Mawasi was designated as a “safe zone”, but was attacked repeatedly over the last 14 months of the Israeli offensive.

“We sleep on the sand and we don’t have enough blankets and we feel the cold inside our tent,” he told. “Only God knows our conditions. Our situation is very difficult.”

In another interview with The Associated Press news agency, al-Faseeh stated that the family's tent was not windproof and that the ground was cold, with temperatures on Tuesday night falling to 9 degrees Celsius.

The infant had woken up three times during the night and her parents discovered her unconscious in the morning, her body stiff, "like wood." He hurried her to Nasser Hospital, but it was too late to save her.

Dr Munir al-Bursh, the director general of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, said baby Sila “froze to death from the extreme cold”, underlining that the site had been declared a “temporary safe humanitarian zone for displaced persons” by the Israeli military.

“This is a screaming example of the consequences of this unfair war and its impact on the people of the Gaza Strip,” said al-Farra.