Health & Healing
Gaza health workers record 3,958 miscarriages in six months
Graphic: Times of Palestine
Original Reporting
Gaza health workers recorded 3,958 miscarriages in the first half of 2026, a figure the director of the Palestinian Medical Relief Society in Gaza, Bassam Zaqout, described as unprecedented in remarks reported by Middle East Monitor and Common Dreams in late July. He linked the rise to repeated displacement, transport over damaged roads, inadequate shelter, poor sanitation and the fear produced by Israeli attacks.
OCHA's humanitarian situation report of 23 July put miscarriages for the same six months at nearly 4,000 and reported severe maternal morbidity in Gaza at 82 cases per 1,000 deliveries.
Recorded live births fell steeply across the same months. Gaza's health ministry logged 5,210 births in January, 3,433 in February, 3,233 in March and 2,004 in April, with 1,701 reported for May, according to figures compiled by the Gaza Centre for Human Rights and reported by Common Dreams. The same compilation gives about 57,000 births in 2022, 54,000 in 2023 and 38,000 in 2024.
Whether that fall measures fewer pregnancies, more pregnancy loss, or the breakdown of birth registration is not settled in any published source. Physicians for Human Rights and the Global Human Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School warned in their January report that systematic data collection in Gaza has become severely limited and that reproductive health figures are likely undercounts.
The care available to women who reach a facility is thin. OCHA reported on 27 March that 17 hospitals and 12 field hospitals across the Strip were providing obstetric and newborn care, though most were only partially functional.
WHO's 2026 health emergency appeal states that all 36 of Gaza's hospitals have been damaged, that only half are partially functional, that 48 per cent of primary health care centres remain operational, and that more than 930 attacks on health care have been recorded since October 2023.
Neonatal capacity is narrower still. Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir el-Balah is the only hospital with a neonatal unit in all of central Gaza, Al Jazeera reported on 25 July, serving thousands of expectant mothers.
A doctor at the unit, Ahmed Abu Hasaballah, told Al Jazeera that staff had worked with shortages of incubators, ventilators and medicines alongside repeated power and fuel cuts that "posed a direct threat to babies inside the incubators".
The pre-war comparison comes from the UN human rights office, which said on 11 December that Gaza's maternal and newborn health system had been decimated.
By late 2024, OHCHR reported, women in Gaza were three times more likely to die in childbirth and three times more likely to miscarry than before the war, while newborn deaths also rose.
It said 94 per cent of hospitals had been damaged or destroyed and, citing health ministry figures, that 1,722 health workers had been killed as of September 2025. The UN account of that briefing carried no Israeli government response.
Earlier facility data show the same pattern. WHO recorded that as of 14 March 2025 only eight of 21 hospitals and four field hospitals were partially operational for maternal health care, according to the PHR report, which also documented 23 reported attacks on facilities providing reproductive health care between January and September 2025 and described smashed incubators in the neonatal unit at Kamal Adwan Hospital.
Some figures in circulation are wrong. UNFPA's July 2025 press release originally reported 220 maternal deaths in the first half of 2025; the agency later corrected it, stating that 220 was the number of stillbirths, not deaths of mothers. Aggregator sites continued to repeat the maternal-death version months afterwards.
Against that, the rebuilding is incremental and documented service by service. UNFPA said in February it had set up medical tents at damaged hospitals, deployed more than 70 midwives since the ceasefire and was helping restore Al Khayr Maternity Hospital in Gaza city; in December, UN News reported the agency supported 22 health facilities, including five hospitals, with 175 midwives across the Strip and around 130 babies born each day.
In the week to 19 July, OCHA reported, UNFPA dispatched medicines, contraceptives and midwifery supplies sufficient for about 1,950 women and girls to Al Helou, Al Awda and Nasser hospitals and to medical points run by Médecins Sans Frontières, and distributed more than 3,700 postpartum kits to 15 maternity hospitals.
In March, the Health Cluster supplied a cardiotocograph to Al Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza city, allowing maternity services there to partially reactivate.
Field capacity has been added in Gaza city, where OCHA reported in December that an International Medical Corps field hospital had installed 200 beds covering surgical, medical, paediatric, neonatal and maternal care, with capacity for up to 45 deliveries a day. Health Cluster partners had reopened or established 55 health service points since 10 October, 37 of them in Gaza city and North Gaza.
Mobile capacity is arriving slowly. Taawon announced in April, in an initiative implemented with UNDP logistical support, a first phase of 12 fully equipped mobile medical units including operating theatres, primary care clinics and mobile laboratories, some solar-powered, together with neonatal incubators. The announcement named implementing agencies rather than donors.
UNFPA said in July 2025 that 170 of its trucks, loaded with containerised maternity units, portable incubators, ultrasounds and maternal health medicines, had been stranded at the borders since early March 2025. Published updates since the ceasefire do not record what became of that specific consignment.
Kangaroo mother care, which systematic reviews and a large trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine found reduces mortality among low birth weight infants, is recommended by WHO after clinical stabilisation. Its use at scale in Gaza's remaining neonatal units does not appear in the UN's published operational updates.
MSF reported that at Al-Helou Hospital in July 2025 five babies were placed in a single incubator, and that on 14 July a baby died when a power cut ended the oxygen supply. Reviewing four facilities it runs or supports between late 2024 and early 2026, the organisation reported rising preterm births and deaths among babies of mothers malnourished during pregnancy.
UNFPA is now commissioning a study with humanitarian partners to identify the risk factors and service gaps behind these outcomes, OCHA reported in July. The Gaza Centre for Human Rights has called for an independent international investigation into whether Israeli policies caused the collapse in births and the rise in pregnancy loss; no such investigation has been announced.
