From the moment Aseel Khaled learned she was pregnant, she was not happy about it. She did not want to bring a child into a life where even the most necessities were unavailable: privacy, safety, access to a clean toilet, or even a drink of water without the exhausting task of carrying a container over long distances.

In a displacement tent in the al-Mawasi area, west of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip, 24-year-old Aseel lives with her husband, Mahmoud, and their three-year-old daughter, Sondos. Their tent is made of plastic sheeting and fabric. They were forcibly displaced from the eastern part of the city in May 2024, after their home was destroyed in the Israeli war.

Life in the tent was worse than anything Aseel had imagined in her nightmares. She had dreamed of living in a house with a garden and small trees she could tend to, just as she had grown up doing in her father’s spacious home. But the war imposed a bitterly different reality.

Aseel spent two years in the tent without ever managing to adapt to life there. She lives under constant stress and anxiety, waiting for the day when she can leave the Gaza Strip and find safety for herself, her daughter, and her husband.

Her unexpected and unplanned pregnancy only made matters worse. She was neither psychologically nor physically prepared for a stage in which her body needed nutritious food, suitable living conditions, and healthcare, none of which was available to her in Gaza.

Once she learned she was pregnant, Aseel found herself facing a reality she could not change and gradually began to adjust to it. But she could not change her daily routine. She continued fetching water in a 15-liter container, carrying it from where large water trucks arrived, around 400 meters from her tent.

She also continued walking to a communal kitchen that provides free meals to displaced people, about 300 meters from her tent, because her husband could not afford the soaring market prices.

The first four months of pregnancy passed almost unnoticed. But during the fifth, sixth, and seventh months, Aseel began suffering from persistent bleeding, weight loss, and an inability to obtain the medical care pregnant women need during these stages.

In her eighth month, Aseel cried out to her husband, asking him to get her to the hospital as quickly as possible after she began experiencing vaginal bleeding and lower abdominal pain. Her husband rushed out of the tent and into the street. It was 10 p.m. He was gone for more than an hour before returning without finding any means of transportation to take her to the hospital, four kilometers away.

During the hour he was gone, Aseel’s bleeding worsened. Blood became visible on her dress because there were no sanitary pads in the tent. Her husband called emergency services and asked for an ambulance. He was told that, because of fuel shortages, ambulances did not go out at night except in response to Israeli strikes and extremely critical cases.

The Road to the Hospital

Aseel and her husband decided to walk to the hospital. After nearly a kilometer, Aseel could no longer continue. They were forced to sit by the roadside for almost an hour, during which not a single car or other vehicle passed by.

The couple eventually resumed their journey despite Aseel’s pain and the bleeding, which worsened with every step. The road felt endless to her. When they finally reached Al-Tahrir Hospital for Women and Maternity at the Nasser Medical Complex, doctors immediately admitted her to the emergency room.

Just minutes after examining her, the obstetrician-gynecologist on duty came out to speak to her husband. He told him that Aseel had lost the fetus and needed an urgent procedure to remove it to save her life, particularly given the amount of blood she had already lost.

Her husband had little choice but to agree. Aseel underwent the procedure, after which the fetus was wrapped in a white shroud and handed to its father for burial in a small grave at a cemetery near the hospital.

Exhausted from the journey and grieving the loss, the father made his way to the cemetery with a relative. There, he began digging a small grave with his own hands for the frail fetus wrapped in white.

His relative told him to dig deeper so that dogs would not be able to reach the body. With no cement available to seal the grave, the father used a piece of metal to dig deeper into the ground.

Together, they dug a grave about half a meter deep, placed the fetus inside, and covered it with soil. They then laid a wooden board over the grave to prevent dogs and cats from reaching the body and digging it up.

The father returned to the hospital to check on his wife. Doctors had recommended that she eat protein-rich foods, such as fresh meat, along with fruits and vegetables. But all he could offer her was canned tuna he had received as humanitarian aid from a UN agency.

Aseel remained in the hospital for three days after the procedure, receiving intravenous vitamins because of the severe physical weakness caused by the blood she had lost before reaching the hospital.

When she was discharged, Aseel returned to the displacement camp in an animal-drawn cart. She went back to life in the tent, with the intense summer heat and the proliferation of rodents and insects, particularly fleas.

And Aseel would not have much time to recover from her pregnancy loss. Back at the tent, the queues for water and food were already waiting.

Shocking Figures

The Palestinian Ministry of Health in the Gaza Strip documented 4,000 miscarriages during the first half of 2026, at a rate of 208 miscarriages per 1,000 births. This represents a roughly 3.3-fold increase compared with the second half of 2025 and is about two to two-and-a-half times the normal rate.

Zaher al-Wahidi, director of the ministry’s Health Information Unit, said the highest miscarriage rate was recorded in April, at 377 cases per 1,000 births, while June recorded the highest absolute number, with 790 miscarriages.

According to al-Wahidi, 26 percent of miscarriages occurred during the second trimester, while around 73.5 percent occurred during the first. He said the high proportion of pregnancy losses between weeks 13 and 24 was particularly concerning, as such cases are often associated with environmental and health factors affecting the mother rather than genetic causes or congenital fetal abnormalities.

He added that this pattern of miscarriage was not prevalent before the war and represents a serious warning sign requiring urgent action from international organizations concerned with maternal and child health.

Al-Wahidi said the Health Ministry had shared these figures with international organizations, including the World Health Organization, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), and UNICEF, and called for urgent health interventions and scientific studies to determine the precise causes of the sharp rise in miscarriages.

The Health Ministry believes five main factors may be driving the increase, foremost among them malnutrition among pregnant women. It noted that the prevalence of anemia among pregnant women reached 57 percent during the second half of 2025, increasing the risk of miscarriage and pregnancy complications.

The ministry also cited the spread of infectious diseases, displacement and overcrowding, as well as the physical burdens placed on women, including carrying water and heavy loads, as major factors threatening the viability of pregnancies.

Water contamination and the spread of sewage are another concern. According to the ministry, more than 100,000 makeshift cesspits have contributed to groundwater contamination, while the lack of chlorination and disinfection has further increased health risks for pregnant women.

Other potential factors, the ministry said, include dust and pollutants generated by Israeli bombardment and the vast quantities of rubble, including asbestos and munitions residue, which may affect the health of pregnant women. It stressed, however, that establishing a precise link between these factors and miscarriages requires specialized scientific research.

Al-Wahidi emphasized that, taken together, these extraordinary conditions undermine pregnant women’s ability to obtain the healthcare they need and exacerbate the risks facing both mothers and fetuses in the Gaza Strip.

All the factors the Palestinian Health Ministry identified as possible contributors to the rise in miscarriages were present in Aseel’s case: contaminated water, malnutrition, exposure to munitions residue, and overcrowding.