Doctors in Gaza say baby girl died of hypothermia, 3rd child to die of cold in recent days

Doctors in the Gaza Strip say a baby girl died of hypothermia, the third child to die of cold in recent days.

The 3-week-old’s family was living in one of the Strip’s tent camps for Palestinians displaced by the war, Channel 12 reports.

The father of baby Sila, Mahmoud al-Faseeh, tells Associated Press he wrapped her in a blanket to try and keep her warm in their tent in the Muwasi area outside the town of Khan Younis, but it wasn’t enough.

He says the tent was not sealed from the wind and the ground was cold, as temperatures dropped to 9 degrees Celsius (48 degrees Fahrenheit).

“It was very cold overnight and as adults we couldn’t even take it. We couldn’t stay warm,” he says. Sila woke up crying three times overnight and in the morning they found her unresponsive, her body stiff.

“She was like wood,” says al-Faseeh. They rushed her to a field hospital where doctors tried to revive her, but her lungs had already deteriorated.

Ahmed al-Farra, director of the children’s ward at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis, confirms that the baby died of hypothermia.

He says two other babies — one 3 days old, the other a month old — had been brought to the hospital over the past 48 hours after dying of hypothermia.

The war sparked by the Hamas-led terror onslaught on Israel on October 7, 2023, in which some 1,200 people in Israel were killed and 251 were taken hostage, has displaced some 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, often multiple times.

Hundreds of thousands are packed into tent camps along the coast as the cold, wet winter sets in.

Yesterday, relatives of some of the 100 hostages held in Gaza warned that their loved ones may not survive a second winter in Hamas’s tunnels.