Tuesday Briefing

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/briefing/gaza-women-russia-ukraine-openai.html

Version 2 of 4.

The streets were empty. The ambulance couldn’t come for more than half an hour, and the hospital’s maternity ward no longer functioned. The only sounds were the noises of planes and shelling.

For Wajiha al-Abyad, who had fled her home weeks earlier, giving birth in Gaza last month was “something like a horror film,” she said.

Women, children and newborns in Gaza are disproportionately bearing the burden of the war, both as casualties and in reduced access to health care services. The U.N. estimates that there are around 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza and that more than 160 babies are delivered every day.

The bombardment, huge levels of displacement, collapsing water and electricity supplies and limited access to food and medicine are severely disrupting maternal, newborn and child health care. None of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are functional enough to treat critical trauma cases or perform surgery, the W.H.O. said.

Related: At least 12 people were killed and dozens were wounded in an attack on the Indonesian Hospital, where thousands of displaced people were sheltering, according to hospital personnel and the Gazan health ministry.

In other news from the war:

The Houthi militia in Yemen released a video showing its forces hijacking a ship, the Galaxy Leader, in the Red Sea, a day after it said it had seized the vessel to show support for “the oppressed Palestinian people.

Hamas has provided no information about the fate of the nearly 240 people believed to be held hostage in Gaza, causing anguish to their loved ones.

In a conflict marked by complete incomprehension on both sides, the ability of Palestinians and Israelis to see each other as human has been lost, Roger Cohen writes in this analysis.