Saved from her dead mother's womb, baby Sabreen was laid to rest in a mournful funeral
Last Saturday Sabreen was pulled from the womb of her dead mother in the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, which also killed her father and her 3-year-old sister. She died five days later.
Even for a baby, the swaddled body of Sabreen Alrouh Joudeh looked impossibly small.
Wrapped in the white burial shroud synonymous with Gaza’s colossal civilian death toll, Sabreen was placed into the dusty ground, the tiny hole matching her brief window in the world.
Last Saturday, she was pulled from the womb of her dead mother in the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Rafah, which also killed her father and her would-be 3-year-old sister. Doctors somehow managed to revive Sabreen — a shard of hope in their otherwise relentlessly bleak duties — but it was a fragile, ephemeral existence. And five days later her family received the call that she had died.
NBC News has followed this weeklong story of loss, hope and then back again, capturing the moment of Sabreen’s birth and the doctors’ frantic efforts to save her. On Thursday, our cameras were the only ones present at Sabreen’s funeral — a mournful and sometimes angry event.
“What did this child do? Did she blow up a tank? Did she blow up a plane? She didn’t have time to do anything,” said family cousin Ali Joudeh, 30, shouting toward the sky as he unwrapped Sabreen’s shroud to reveal her lifeless, doll-sized face. “Oh, God. She is a bird in heaven.”
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