Collapse of maternal and newborn health care
According to WHO and the Health Cluster, almost 60% of all health facilities are non-functional, putting immense pressure on the few facilities that are still functioning and the even smaller number of facilities that provide emergency obstetric care.
Even after the “ceasefire” and improved aid deliveries, around 46% of essential medicines remain out of stock, including drugs for induction/treatment of labor, obstetric and postpartum hemorrhage, anesthesia and pain management, infections and respiratory diseases, according to the latest Ministry of Health report. According to the latest projections from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), 37,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women will also be affected by acute malnutrition and require treatment by mid-October 2026.
Medical personnel interviewed by Amnesty International reported that even since the “ceasefire,” women giving birth suffered extreme shortages of food, medicine and nutritional supplements during much of their pregnancy and after childbirth. Most women who come to hospitals to give birth suffer from anemia due to malnutrition and from water-borne diseases and other infectious diseases due to contaminated water and unsanitary conditions. They often lack the necessary equipment for examinations and sometimes have to resort to expired anesthetics.
According to medical workers interviewed, Israel’s ongoing genocide has led to an exponential deterioration in maternal and newborn health conditions over the past 29 months. These diseases include premature births, underweight babies, weight loss and malnutrition in pregnant and breastfeeding women, prenatal anxiety and postpartum depression, respiratory diseases during pregnancy due to exposure to cold and increased pollution, respiratory diseases in newborns due to premature births and inadequate lung development, among others.
In the maternity ward of Al-Helou, neonatologist Dr. Nasser Bulbol said the number of high-risk pregnancies they treat has increased significantly because mothers’ immune systems are weakened due to malnutrition: