When an Israeli shell hit Gaza’s largest fertility clinic in December, the explosion ripped the lids off five liquid nitrogen tanks stored in Gaza’s embryology department. This was reported by the Reuters news agency.
The consequences of this single explosion were far-reaching. It is an example of the unprecedented toll that Israeli aggression, which has lasted six and a half months, has taken on Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants. The embryos in those tanks were the last hope for hundreds of Palestinian couples facing infertility.
“We are very aware of what these 5,000 lives, or potential lives, meant to the parents both in the future and in the past,” said Baha Eddin Al-Galayini, 73, a Cambridge-trained obstetrician and gynaecologist who founded the Gaza clinic in 1997.
He said at least half of couples, those who cannot create viable embryos, will not have another chance to become pregnant.
“My heart is broken into a million pieces,” he said.
Large families are common in the Gaza Strip, where nearly half the population is under 18 and the birth rate is high at 3.38 births per woman, according to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics. Britain’s fertility rate, for example, is 1.63 births per woman.
Despite poverty in Gaza, couples facing infertility are resorting to IVF and some are selling televisions and jewellery to cover the costs, Al-Galayini said.
At least nine clinics in Gaza offer the IVF procedure, in which eggs are taken from a woman’s ovaries and fertilised with sperm in a laboratory.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to destroy Hamas, but has begun exterminating the entire population of Gaza. As a result, more than 33,000 Palestinians have died, according to Gaza health authorities.
According to a Reuters journalist in April, the embryology lab was still littered with rubble of masonry, blown up lab supplies, and among the debris were tanks of liquid nitrogen where there may still be human embryos.
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