In the corners of war, loss is not measured only in the number of the dead. It is measured in the invisible distances planted between bodies and hearts, in the space between a mother's arms and the child she was not allowed to hold.
This is the story of dozens of premature babies born at the most brutal moments of Israel's bombardment and siege of Gaza , who were then taken from their mothers and transferred across borders without farewell.
Thirty-one-year-old Samer Lulu never imagined that the wait for his first child would become a journey of separation stretching two and a half years.
On 30 October 2023, his wife was the last woman to give birth at Al-Shifa hospital before the maternity ward was transferred to the nearby Al-Helou International Hospital .
There, she delivered their daughter Kanda by emergency caesarean section (C-section) after suffering severe pregnancy complications, including pre-eclampsia and acute swelling that put both her life and the baby's at risk.
The day before the birth, the family had been displaced in Jabalia camp. "We had no choice but to go to Al-Awda hospital in northern Gaza," Samer recalls.
"They told us the situation was critical and they couldn't intervene. We had to get to Al-Shifa immediately."
The road was neither safe nor easy. "We were besieged," he says. "We spent the night waiting for morning, as though we were waiting for a chance to live."
At first light, he made his way to the hospital with difficulty. His wife was taken straight to the operating theatre.
After the birth, the doctors told him Kanda would need at least ten to fifteen days in an incubator before her condition stabilised.
His life split in two: a wife recovering at Al-Helou, a daughter fighting to survive at Al-Shifa.
"I was sleeping on the hospital doorstep," he says, "moving between my wife and my daughter, as though my soul was divided between two places."
This continued for four days, during which he sometimes returned to his family's home in Sheikh Radwan to rest before rushing back.
On the fourth day, he heard that Al-Helou hospital had been struck.
"I collapsed to the ground," he says. "I lost consciousness from fear." He rushed to find that a shell had hit the upper floor. His wife had survived by a miracle.
He returned to Al-Shifa to take Kanda home. The doctors refused. Her condition was still too unstable.
He did not know that would be their longest goodbye. A face on a screen Samer and his wife returned to Jabalia camp . Then Al-Shifa was besieged. Communications with the medical team were cut entirely. The camp itself was under siege.
"We were following the news on a small screen running on solar power," he says, "trying to catch any piece of information."
Then, in a television broadcast, Samer glimpsed his daughter among a group of premature babies. "I recognised her from the way she was lying," he says.
"I screamed: that's my daughter, Kanda is still alive." His wife could not identify her. She had never seen her.
Kanda's condition had deteriorated severely. Her weight had dropped from 1.5 kilogrammes to 800 grams. Later, it emerged she had developed serious complications, including enlargement of the liver and spleen and elevated liver enzymes. Her heart stopped twice during her treatment in Cairo before she was saved.
When limited communications were restored, Samer managed to reach one of the doctors, who told him the babies had been transferred to southern Gaza.
During the first truce at the end of November, Samer and his wife did not hesitate. They displaced southward, looking for any trace of their daughter.
The news that met them was harder than anything they had prepared for. "They told us the babies had been evacuated to Egypt."
A full month passed before his wife was able to obtain travel coordination to Cairo. She was permitted to go, but he was not, and only there did the full picture of what had happened begin to emerge.
"When Kanda was born, she had no illnesses," Samer says. "What happened in the hospital is what caused all these complications."
He describes that period as "feelings that cannot be endured." This was his first child, long-awaited, and she had grown up without him, behind closed borders and merciless distances.
After two and a half years, the reunion finally came. Samer held Kanda for the first time since she was a newborn. "Every day that passed felt like a hundred years," he says.
The family lost their home and lived through chapters of displacement and fear. But that embrace returned to them something of the life that had been taken.
"She came back to us," he says. "But the years that were lost, they don't come back." View this post on Instagram A post shared by The New Arab (@thenewarab) 'He grew up like an orphan' Twenty-six-year-old Israa Ghabn also did not imagine that her son's birth story would end in a long separation, during which her child grew up far from her, as though she were an absent mother while he was alive.
Israa, a mother of five from Beit Lahia in northern Gaza, now displaced in Deir al-Balah , recalls the night that changed everything.
"I felt pain and went to the hospital. After the examination, they told me the foetus had oxygen deficiency and fluid on his chest, and I had to have an emergency caesarean immediately to save him."
On the night of 4 November 2023, she gave birth to her son, Adam, at Al-Helou International Hospital. Before she had caught her breath, morning came, and her son was taken to the incubators at Al-Shifa.
"They prevented us from accompanying him. They said we had to leave."
For a full week, she received reassurances from the doctors about Adam. Then everything stopped. The Al-Shifa complex was besieged. Communications were cut. News disappeared.
"We heard that the situation of the premature babies was critical. We lost hope. We expected that my son had died."
A week after the storming of the hospital, word reached them that some of the babies had been transferred to hospitals in the south. Israa and her husband did not hesitate. They displaced to Rafah and began searching.
"We went to every hospital. We were looking for any news of Adam. We found nothing."
Hope returned as a thin thread when they learned from the UAE field hospital that the premature babies had been evacuated to Egypt and that Adam was still alive.
But life now meant a new kind of waiting.
A full month passed without any means of contact until an Egyptian friend attempted to reach him.
"She went more than once, and they didn't allow her to see him until she proved she was representing us," Israa shared. After a month, through her, Israa saw her son for the first time in a photograph on social media. "Just a photo, but it was what reassured me he was alive."
The family later obtained an Egyptian doctor's number and began calling to ask after Adam, while their attempts to travel to him continued without success.
"We tried to coordinate travel, but it never worked out," they revealed. In their absence, Adam grew up far away. "We found out he had been moved to a shelter. He was raised as though he were an orphan, even though he has a mother, a father and siblings."
Israa's voice breaks as she describes those months. "They were very hard days. Every time I saw his siblings playing, I would say, if only Adam were with them. I couldn't sleep, day or night, from fear for him."
She pauses, then continues. "He was two years and four months old, and I had never held him, never smelled him. I used to wish he could sleep in my arms."
Ten days ago, the long-awaited call came. "The Ministry of Health told us to wait for him at one o'clock at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. We waited until seven in the evening."
Adam came back. But the reunion was not what she had imagined.
"He didn't accept us," she says. "He was a stranger to us."
The hardest blow came when doctors told them their son had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder, something the family had no prior knowledge of.
"I was very sad," Israa says. "How can something this important happen in my son's life, and I don't know about it?"
Today, Israa stands before her son, trying to rebuild a relationship that was never given the chance to begin.
"I want him to call me mama. I want him to accept me. He can't understand that we are his family."
Between a mother waiting for a single word and a child searching for a familiarity he never knew, the distance between them is greater than absence.
It is years of deprivation that cannot easily be compressed into the moment of a reunion. Ansam Al Qitaa is a freelance journalist based in Gaza. For years, she has covered the successive wars in Gaza and their humanitarian and social impacts for international and local outlets This piece is published in collaboration with Egab