This footage was filmed and produced 29 March 2024.

Around 1.5 million people – including tens of thousands of pregnant women, new mothers and newborns – are crammed into Rafah, with insufficient food to eat, hardly any access to medical care, nowhere to sleep, and nowhere safe to go.

Around 180 women give birth every day in Gaza amid the destruction, facing unimaginable challenges to access adequate medical care. The number of difficult births has soared compared to the time before the conflict. Mothers and babies are sick, malnourished, scared, and exhausted – and nursing staff often lack supplies. Doctors say they no longer see healthy sized babies and are witnessing babies dying simply because their birth weight is just too low.

If women and their newborns do survive pregnancy and childbirth, they must return to squalid conditions in displacement sites, accompanied by hunger and the diseases that stalk it, amid life-threatening shortages of food, water and medical care. Mothers, tired and malnourished, are struggling to provide milk for their newborns. If formula is available in the camps of the displaced and is affordable, finding the clean water to boil and mix with it is a struggle.

Securing nappies – a necessity many mothers take for granted – has also become a challenge, as prices skyrocket for items made scarce by close to six months of war. Mothers are forced to look for alternatives. In flimsy tents in camps for displaced people in Rafah, there is also nowhere to