Greater Middle East (bbabo.net), - When an Israeli shell hit Gaza's largest fertility clinic in December, the explosion blew the lids off five liquid nitrogen containers stored in Gaza's embryology department. This was reported today, April 17, by Reuters.
The consequences of this single explosion were far-reaching. This is an example of the unprecedented toll that Israel's six-and-a-half-month aggression has inflicted on 2.3 million Gazans. The embryos in these tanks were the last hope for hundreds of Palestinian couples facing infertility.
“We understand very well what these 5,000 lives, or potential lives, meant to parents, both in the future and in the past,” said Baha Eddin Al-Ghalayini, 73, a Cambridge-educated obstetrician and gynecologist who founded clinic in Gaza in 1997.
At least half of couples who cannot create viable embryos will not have another chance to get pregnant, he said.
“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 fertility rate is high at 3.38 births per woman, according to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics. For example, the UK fertility rate is 1.63 births per woman.
Despite poverty in Gaza, couples facing infertility are turning to IVF, Al-Ghalayini said, and some are selling televisions and jewelry to pay the costs.
At least nine clinics in Gaza offer IVF, in which eggs are removed from a woman's ovaries and fertilized with sperm in a laboratory.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised to destroy Hamas, but began the destruction of the entire population of Gaza. As a result, more than 33,000 Palestinians died, according to Gaza health authorities.
According to a Reuters journalist, in April the embryology laboratory was still littered with rubble, blown-up laboratory supplies, and among the rubble were tanks of liquid nitrogen that may still contain human embryos.
bbabo.Net