The consequences of the genocidal war on Gaza are now visible at the very beginning of life. Medical staff report that harm has extended from pregnant women to unborn children and infants, reshaping the most fragile stages of human development. Hospitals describe a pattern in which the future itself is being damaged, as miscarriages rise, births decline, and serious health complications appear among newborns who have known nothing but siege and bombardment.

Doctors working in neonatal and maternity wards say the pressure on mothers’ health, combined with prolonged deprivation of essential nutrition and medicine, has altered pregnancy outcomes across the territory. Low birth weight, premature delivery and congenital conditions are increasingly common, reflecting an environment in which survival is uncertain even before birth. Health officials argue that these trends cannot be separated from policies that restrict food, supplements and medical supplies, turning pregnancy into a daily risk and infancy into a medical emergency.

Medical facilities, already weakened, are now overwhelmed. Neonatal intensive care units operate far beyond capacity, with staff forced to improvise amid shortages of incubators, medicines and diagnostic tools. Physicians link the surge in complications to malnutrition, toxic remnants of bombardment and the collapse of preventive care. The destruction of specialised centres, including fertility services, has compounded the damage, erasing years of medical work and extinguishing possibilities that had been carefully preserved for the future.

Beyond the delivery room, children who survive birth face a healthcare system pushed to the edge. Paediatric wards report unfamiliar illnesses appearing at scale, alongside severe malnutrition, weakened immunity and untreated psychological trauma. With clinics destroyed and equipment ruined, doctors describe practising medicine without the tools normally required, warning that the cumulative effect is the steady production of a generation marked by illness and deprivation. In their assessment, this is not an accidental by-product of fighting but a sustained outcome of a genocide that reaches from the womb into childhood.