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Image by Emad El Byed from Unsplash
Airstrikes have killed children born from IVF, while shelling of fertility clinic’s lab has shattered other families’ dreams.
It took surgery and five years of IVF treatment for Amal to fall pregnant for the first and only time. That struggle against infertility lasted almost as long as her son Khaled’s short life. He was just seven years old when on 17 October an Israeli airstrike on Rafah, one of the first of the war, hit the family home.
Khaled was killed and Amal was plunged into a grief heightened by memories of her long battle to become a mother. Sometimes she struggles to keep going. “Death, in all its finality, seems less daunting than the relentless pain of living without Khaled,” she said. “He was the most precious thing in my life.”
The war in Gaza has created a grim inventory of different forms of loss. Among them is the particular pain of current and former IVF patients, in a place where large families are common and children are often the heart of...