A veteran midwife continues delivering babies across Gaza’s displacement camps, defying war, loss, and the collapse of the health system to keep life going.

Amid the collapse of Gaza’s healthcare system and the relentless sound of Israeli bombardment, Fayza Shreim, a 65-year-old nurse and midwife known among displaced families as Um Saleh, continues to deliver life inside the Strip’s displacement camps.

With winter cold setting in and medical services largely absent, Shreim moves between tents and makeshift shelters carrying a worn medical bag and more than four decades of experience. She conducts examinations and oversees births inside half-destroyed rooms, schools turned into shelters, tents, and, at times, ambulances that themselves come under fire.

“Life has to go on,” she told Al Jazeera Mubasher. “Even if all of Gaza is bleeding.”

Though officially retired, Shreim has not stopped working since the war began. As hospitals shut down and clinics were destroyed, she shifted from routine nursing work to becoming a field midwife and emergency responder in areas with no functioning health facilities.

Before the war, she said, her work focused on women and children under normal conditions. “Now,” she explained, “we deliver babies in shelters, schools, and tents.”

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The war has left deep personal scars. Shreim lost her pregnant daughter—seven months along—along with two grandchildren in a single airstrike. Two of her sons were later killed, as were her sons-in-law. She and her remaining family have been displaced 13 times.

Yet she continues.

To leave women alone during childbirth, she says, would be “a crime against humanity.”

Birth Under Fire

Shreim recalls one of the most dangerous moments of the war: delivering a woman’s baby inside an ambulance while shelling continued around them.

“The ambulance was being targeted. The roads were filled with shrapnel and twisted metal,” she said. “When I realized the mother was ready to give birth, I asked the driver to stop.”

Both the mother and her twin babies survived without complications.

In another instance, she rushed to assist a woman who had given birth alone at home but needed urgent post-delivery care. Shreim said she was forced to go back and forth several times under fire to retrieve the necessary medical tools.

Despite the constant danger, she says what keeps her going is the sound of a newborn’s first cry.

“When I hear that cry,” Shreim said, “I forget the sound of the bombing. I forget the war.”

For her, that sound is a reminder that life persists—and that Gaza, despite everything, continues to endure.

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(Al-Jazeera Mubasher – edited and prepared by the Palestine Chronicle)