Rockets, bombs and babies: Wartime in the maternity ward

I spent the recent 11-day war between Israel and Gaza in the maternity ward in Soroka hospital in Beersheva, I was looking after my daughter, first for a few days of labor and then following the birth of her twin girls. I was sleeping on couches, in chairs, or on a mattress on the floor, either at the hospital or at the apartment of my younger daughter who lives nearby. These were days when Beersheva was in Hamas’ crosshairs, especially at night, and sirens regularly announced incoming rocket attacks – hundreds of them – giving residents 15 seconds to find a safe room or, in the case of the hospital, a semi-safe hallway. This meant days of contraction-siren-run-contraction-siren-run to feed-siren-run-diaper-siren-run. Or, when I was sleeping out of the hospital, it meant constantly running to a neighbor’s flat, where we squeezed into a tiny bedroom and waited it out. It was an unusual way to get to know the community. 

In the maternity ward, women from all walks of life in the Negev who all had in common that they very recently gave birth, were constantly jostled  along with their newborn babies. Any woman who has ever given birth will appreciate the challenge of trying to run either during heavy contractions or during those first days of recovery. The images of all these new mothers running for cover with their newborns will stay with me for a long time. Perhaps the entire, severely anxious, experience just added one more layer of pain, discomfort and strangeness to the already arduous process of childbirth. 

Yet, despite its intensity, the experience was also oddly divorced from politics. During those 11 days I didn’t spend much time following the news – though I was living smack in the middle of it. As we stood in those hallways, the Muslim, Jewish, and Bedouin women of all ages and skin colors, were more likely to comment on the beautiful hair of each other’s babies than to even mention politics or war. I had lots of mini-chats with other women like me – mothers of mothers, the caretakers in the ward— as we shared our own experiences in this role, which is new to me. We weren’t talking politics, even as the war took place overheads, punctuating our conversations with the booms of Iron Dome. We were just people–women, mostly, especially during the night attacks, when men were not allowed to sleep over in the hospital–trying to get through this shared human experience of childbirth, with all the challenges presented at us. In that setting, it didn’t even make any sense to frame the rocket experience as particularly aimed at Jews. It was just part of the violence aimed at humanity. 

Even though I lived through a very particular location on the Israeli “side” of the war, my heart was also on the other “side”. As much as I was shaken by the constant sirens and booms and running for cover, I could not help but think about what the people of Gaza were going through, the ones without safe rooms and Iron Dome, for whom a ten-minute warning meant not that a rocket was being shot out of the sky but that a bomb was about to land in their actual home. As bad as people in Israel had it during those 11 days, the people of Gaza had it much worse, and it is going to take them a long time to recover, if at all. The families of the dozens of children who died may never truly recover. 

[image: my son-in-law, Matan, holding one of his one-day-old babies during a rocket siren in Soroka hospital, Beersheva, May 2021 Credit: Elana Sztokman]

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