2:39 PM @samarabuelouf The Pregnant Woman
Wisal Abu Odeh, 34, fainted after standing in line for an hour to use a bathroom. Life was hard for everyone in the dirty, cramped camp for displaced people in Khan Younis. But she was five months pregnant.
“Sometimes,” she said in November, “I think it would have been better to die in my house.”
Before the war, Ms. Abu Odeh was thinking about decorating a Spider-Man-themed nursery for the baby boy she was expecting. After the fighting began, she worried about making it through her pregnancy alive.
Conditions are dire at the U.N. camps that house most of Gaza’s displaced people. Diarrhea, respiratory infections and hygiene-related conditions like lice are soaring, the United Nations says. Thousands of people often share a single shower or toilet.
Amid all of that chaos live about 50,000 pregnant women, and about 180 give birth each day, the U.N. estimates. Basic care is unavailable. Cesarean sections are sometimes performed without anaesthetic. Many women give birth in tents or toilets, according to Doctors Without Borders.
Ms. Abu Odeh said she was sleeping in a space with 14 other girls and women. Stricken by hunger and fear, they sometimes felt tensions explode. She had seen women punching or pulling hair in disputes over food or water — or jumping the line to go to the bathroom.
Lately, the fighting reached her camp and she could not be reached by phone.
@samarabuelouf @nytimes 
