Over the past 80 days, more than 300 miscarriages have been recorded across the Gaza Strip, according to the Gaza-based Palestinian Ministry of Health.
‘I Lost My Baby to Hunger’:
Miscarriages Soar in Gaza as Israel
Intensifies War and Siege
Sally Ibrahim / The New Arab
GAZA (May 22, 2025) — For five months, Hadeel Masoud, a Gaza-based woman, held onto hope. Her pregnancy had come after a decade of waiting, years punctuated by longing, prayers, and silence. But quiet, relentless, and merciless hunger took everything from her.
“I’ve been waiting for this child for ten years,” the 35-year-old told The New Arab as her voice was barely audible as she clutched a black-and-white ultrasound image inside a makeshift tent in Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood. “But I couldn’t protect him from hunger.”
Her fetus, she was later told, had stopped moving days before she arrived at the hospital. Malnutrition had weakened her body so drastically that it could not even expel the dead child.
“He stayed inside me for two days,” she said. “I wasn’t just a grieving mother. I was a starving body, broken, waiting for relief that never came.”
Hadeel’s story is but one of hundreds.
Over the past 80 days, more than 300 miscarriages have been recorded across the Gaza Strip, according to the Gaza-based Palestinian Ministry of Health.
The causes, health officials say, are disturbingly clear: widespread hunger, acute anaemia, untreated infections, and complete deprivation of prenatal care due to Israel’s ongoing blockade.
“We are witnessing a slow, deliberate collapse,” Munir al-Borsh, Director General of the Ministry of Health in Gaza, told TNA.
“Pregnant women are among the most vulnerable, and they are dying silently, one after the other, along with their unborn children,” he said.
He accused Israel of deploying a policy of “systematic starvation”, therefore killing 58 people via direct malnutrition, and an additional 242 from deprivation of essential food and medicine, most of whom were elderly.
Twenty-six kidney patients have died due to the lack of basic nutritional and medical care, he also noted.
From Hunger to Miscarriage
In Shujaiya, 46-year-old Raghda al-Masri sat beside her daughter Razan, 22, who miscarried at 24 weeks.
“She dreamed of holding her baby, of nursing him in peace,” Raghda told TNA while brushing her daughter’s sweat-soaked hair away from her face.
“But hunger killed that dream,” she added.
Razan had been diagnosed with severe anaemia weeks earlier, yet there were no iron pills in the hospital, and no meat, eggs, or even vegetables at home.
“When the bleeding started, I knew. Her body couldn’t hold on,” Raghda explained.
The maternity wards across Gaza often echo the same story: a generation of women losing their pregnancies in overcrowded hospitals, many of which have out of folic acid, prenatal vitamins, or even basic obstetric equipment.
“Silent health massacres are happening every day,” Hanan Salha, a midwife who works at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, remarked to TNA.
“Every shift, I see women come in pale, weak, and bleeding. We can’t give them what they need, not even a basic iron supplement. We try to keep them alive,” she said.
She added that 70 percent of the pregnant women she sees suffer from anaemia, hypertension related to starvation, and “clear signs of emaciation. Many arrive after collapsing from hunger or haemorrhaging from early labour. It is not just the number of cases, it is the speed. It is like an avalanche.”
In a dusty corner of a field clinic in Deir al-Balah, 26-year-old Maysaa Jouda, six months pregnant, wrapped her arms around her belly.
“Every kick is a miracle, but I’m terrified when it stops. I eat once a day. Sometimes not at all. I feel like I am dying, and I am afraid he will, too,” the young mother said to TNA.
Mohammed Joda, an obstetrician at Al-Shifa Hospital, described the surge in miscarriages as part of a “dangerous pattern” linked to Gaza’s dire food insecurity caused by Israel.
“We are no longer dealing with individual tragedies,” he told TNA. “This is a structural collapse. A pattern of starvation-related fetal loss is unfolding right before our eyes.”
He explained that deficiencies in protein, zinc, iron, and folic acid all contribute to intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR), a leading cause of stillbirth and miscarriage.
“Add chronic stress, psychological trauma, and lack of shelter, and you have a lethal mix,” he said.
The World Food Programme recently warned that Gaza is on the brink of full-scale famine. But for thousands of expectant mothers, that brink has already been crossed.
Since the outbreak of Israel’s genocidal war 19 months ago, Israel imposed a tightened blockade on the war-torn coastal enclave, often preventing the entry of food and basic needs for locals.
On 2 March, Israel sealed off the strip, pushing the local Palestinian population into starvation, according to Palestinian and UN aid organisations.
‘A War Against Mothers’
Health officials say the blockade’s effects go far beyond nutrition.
“Israel is not just closing borders,” Marwan al-Hams, director of Gaza’s field hospitals in the health ministry, said to TNA, “It is closing wombs.”
He described the miscarriages and deaths of pregnant Palestinian women as “a war crime” and accused Israeli authorities of weaponising hunger. “This is a war against mothers. Against unborn children. Against the future of Gaza,” he stressed.
Despite mounting international condemnation, Israel continues to seal off the crossings. Sporadic aid convoys arrive in the south but are insufficient, often delayed, and sometimes looted before they reach hospitals. Pregnant women in northern and central Gaza are almost entirely cut off.
Meanwhile, doctors report treating patients without access to clean water, protein, or prenatal vitamins. “We can’t even give women milk. The shelves are empty. The pharmacies are empty. And so are the wombs,” al-Hams added.
Hospital waiting rooms, tents, and bombed-out clinics are being filled up with patients and stories, each one crying for help.
Heba Dawas, a nurse at a mobile clinic in Nasser hospital, described treating a woman who hadn’t eaten in three days. “She didn’t even have water. Her fetus was already gone. She kept asking if she had done something wrong,” she told TNA.
But in Gaza today, hunger is not a choice, and miscarriage is no longer a personal tragedy. It is a collective scream for help from a besieged population.
More than 50,000 pregnant women remain in Gaza, many of them displaced, living without shelter, food, or medical care. Aid organisations have warned that unless crossings are opened and humanitarian aid allowed to flow freely, the miscarriages will continue, and the death toll will rise.
“We are losing the next generation before it’s even born. If the world doesn’t intervene now, we may never recover,” Dawas said.
