[Al Jazeera]
A DOCTOR HAS hailed the successful delivery of a premature baby from the womb of a woman fatally wounded during an Israeli airstrike as a ‘miracle’.
Medics carried out an emergency C-section to save the baby’s life after her mother died on the operating table.
The 23-year-old woman was killed after the airstrike hit a house in the central Gaza town of Deir al-Balah.
According to Al Jazeera’s report on the attack, there were four families inside the two-storey building when it was struck in the middle of the night.
Dr Fadi Al-Khrote, one of the medics who saved the baby, said he believed “what’s happened is a miracle” as the infant’s mother had been dead for around ten minutes before the operation could be completed.
He said it was generally the case that if the mother was dead for more than five minutes, her baby would die too.
The little girl’s chances of survival are rated at 50/50 by the doctors, according to the BBC.
US Network ABC News reports that the child’s father, who is believed to be associated with the group Islamic Jihad, has gone into hiding.
The strikes took the Palestinian death toll in Gaza since Israel launched its offensive on July 8 to 865.
Rockets and mortar rounds fired into Israel have killed three civilians — two Israelis and a Thai farm worker — and fighting in and around Gaza has killed 35 Israeli soldiers.
Human rights watchdogs say that some 80 percent of the Palestinian dead have been civilians, many of them women or children.
Includes reporting from AFP.
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