In late October 2023, Israeli strikes killed dozens of Palestinians in the Sabra neighborhood of Gaza City. Among those wounded was a newborn baby girl — whom rescuers found in a tree.
Paramedics rushed the infant to Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, the Gaza Strip's biggest hospital at the time, and handed her over to Dr. Nasser Bolbol, who placed her in an incubator.
"I was told she was the only survivor of a massacre," says Bolbol, the head of the hospital's premature babies department. The stump of the baby girl's umbilical cord was still soft. There were traces of milk reflux on her, a sign that she'd been breastfed during or immediately before the attack.
Bolbol recorded her arrival in the hospital's newborns registry, along with the date and location where she was found.
But nobody knew if her family had survived — and no one knew the baby's name.
"I myself wrote the word 'unknown' on her file," Bolbol says.
