Newborn Soad Qeshtah seen in an incubator in Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis, hours before she died. Her mother, who was seven months pregnant, was killed in an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip and the baby was delivered by emergency cesarean section, in July 2025.Credit: Mariam Dagga/AP

Six newborns, at least two of whom were premature, lie crammed into a single crib at Gaza City’s Al-Ahli Hospital, mere days before Rosh Hashanah. It would have been better had they not been born. These are harsh words, but they are realistic.

Dr. Michal Feldon, an Israeli pediatrician, posted a photograph of the neonates, huddled together, on Facebook. “There are no words for this, because there is no reason or justification for this. Hamas has nothing to do with it. Israel alone did this. We,” the doctor wrote, noting that she had verified the authenticity of the image.

The six neonates share a single heated crib; there is no incubator for the preemies. They lie on their backs, heads tilted to the side, sleeping the sleep of newborns; a leg touches a head, shoulder to shoulder: The bed is meant for a single newborn. The Gaza Strip’s next generation is packed together like sardines in a tin. They came into the world over the weekend, among the last children born in Gaza in the current Jewish year.

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The day after Rosh Hashanah, Israeli newspapers will – as they do every year – publish touching stories of the first babies to be born in the new year. When these children grow older, their parents will show them these touching photographs.

The six babies born over the weekend in Gaza have neither a present nor a future. It’s uncertain whether they even have two living parents, and even less certain whether their parents will survive the coming years to one day show them the photograph.

The preemies are unlikely to live through the next several days. For the others, every day that follows will be marked by suffering. Their eyes have yet to open, and they cannot know the reality into which they were born. These moments, huddled together in the hospital’s heated crib, will be the most innocent and happiest of their lives. What comes after will be far worse.

A few of them might not live to see their first birthday. The Israel Defense Forces is liable to kill them first, as it has already done to over 1,000 infants under the age of one, according to figures from Save the Children, citing data from the government in Gaza.

A Palestinian woman comforts another holding the body of her baby, killed in Israeli strikes on the the Abou Mahadi family home in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip on April 28, 2025.Credit: AFP/BASHAR TALEB

Others will drift with their families from tent to tent, under bombardment and in hunger. Some of these newborns will lose a limb and join the many thousands of children already crawling through the ruins with only one leg or one arm, or less. Others will soon lose their parents.

Around 40,000 children in Gaza have already lost one parent, and some 17,000 have lost both. Their lives will be far shorter than those of the previous generation. A study published in The Lancet medical journal found that life expectancy in Gaza plunged to 40.5 years, from 75.5, in just two years.

The years ahead will be marked by unbearable suffering, hunger, poverty and fear. Israel’s assault on them still rages, and it’s far from over. Even when it ends, there’ll be no place for them to lay their heads. Israel has turned all of Gaza into a place unfit for human life for years to come, just as it promised.

They’ll have no home. Schools and playgrounds are out of the question. Camps, after-school activities or family outings are beyond imagination. It’s doubtful they’ll have enough to eat. If they fall ill, there will be no way, and no place, to treat them. Israel has destroyed nearly all of Gaza’s hospitals.

Childhood dreams, apart from a plate of thin soup, won’t exist for the six infants in the heated crib. It’s doubtful they’ll know a single quiet, safe moment in their lives, amid the relentless bombings. It’s doubtful they’ll ever know a single moment of happiness. Where could such a moment even exist? In the detention camp in southern Gaza, where Israel will force them to crowd together? In the famine camps of South Sudan, where they are said to be expelled to? An old man, a newborn in Gaza – what remains for them in life?

If they survive, the six babies from the crib will never forget who inflicted this upon them, who shattered their lives from the very first day. And if they live to have children and grandchildren of their own, they’ll tell them.

Gideon Levy