By Ma Xiaoyan, Huang Heng, Xinhua,
Jerusalem : Having given birth to quadruplets after being transferred from the segregated Gaza Strip, Khawlah Fadlalla became a happy mother in an Israeli hospital.
However, the happiness of the new mother was tainted by the knowledge that the father of her four babies, a Gazan blocked outside an Israeli checkpoint, could not join her and the children any time soon.
“He told everyone the pleasant surprise that he had become a father of quadruplets, but he could not see them as he was denied by the Israelis to enter the Erez checkpoint,” Khawlah told Xinhua on Monday at Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon, a coastal city some 10km from northern Gaza.
She agreed that her husband’s absence was totally an unsurprising real life of the Gaza residents, saying many of them had similar experience and were separated from their loved ones, but still, it is too hard for her to take.
Khawlah was admitted to Barzilai more than a month ago, after she suddenly had the symptom of a premature delivery while waiting to cross the Erez checkpoint between Gaza Strip and Israel. She delivered two boys and two girls on Wednesday with the help of four Israeli neonatologists.
“How can I describe the joy? Isn’t it mixed with a little bit sorrow?” said the 31-year-old mother. “I don’t know if the babies could see their father when they open the eyes for the first time. Even my relatives in the West Bank can not come over to visit me.”
Born in the West Bank city of Tulkarem, Khawlah married Issam Fadlalla five years ago, who was originally from Khan Yunis in Gaza but had been living in the West Bank for more than 10 years.
The new couple’s life suddenly broke down a month and a half after their marriage, as Issam was arrested and charged with falsifying an Israeli identity card for work permission in the Jewish state.
Issam was repatriated to Gaza several months after being in custody in an Israeli prison. Following her husband, Khawlah went to Gaza too, and stayed there for seven months.
“I applied for a visitor’s permit and went inside Gaza, but never thought that I would live there,” Khawlah recounted, “Gaza is a terrible place. People have neither job nor money, but wander on the streets all day long.”
Like many jobless Gazans, the couple had no choice but to live on relief from the UN.
Israel has tightened sanctions on Gaza since Hamas seized control of the territory in a conflict with the rival and more moderate Fatah faction in June, 2007.
A World Bank report said that 90 percent of Gaza’s industrial production ceased and agricultural output fell by 50 percent last year, resulting in humanitarian crises at every level of Gazan society.
Israeli army claimed that goods are being trucked into Gaza on a daily basis, which saves its people from hunger. But, for Khawlah, it obviously does not make Gaza a place where she can have the means to raise her four babies.
Asked about the near future of the quadruplets when the hospitalization ends, Khawlah said without hesitation that she wouldn’t raise them in Gaza.
“Maybe I would go to Ramallah for a while and then live with my parents in my home village. I need their economic support. But my dream now is to let the babies live with their father,” she added.
Babies’ crying passed through the hall and waked the mother up. Khawlah, still suffering from high blood pressure, struggled to drag her body off bed, shuffled towards the neonatal intensive care unit where her four babies were kept.
“I hope the family could get together as soon as possible. I hope, I hope,” she mumbled.