Cairo/Gaza (Reuters) – Born prematurely in Gaza just before war broke out, the baby girl was treated at Al Shifa Hospital as it gradually collapsed, separated from her displaced family, then evacuated to Egypt on Monday along with her mother and 27 other Palestinian newborns.

Lobna al-Saik, the baby’s mother, was one of a few parents accompanying some of the 28 infants as they were taken in a convoy of ambulances from a hospital in southern Gaza, through the Rafah border crossing, into Egypt to receive treatment.

“They are innocent children, premature babies,” an exhausted al-Saik said in a video interview provided by the Egyptian government. “My message to the world is ‘enough’.”

Egyptian television footage showed medical staff at Rafah carefully picking up tiny babies from inside Palestinian ambulances and placing them in mobile incubators, which were then wheeled across a car park towards Egyptian ambulances.

The babies, from a total of 31 moved on Sunday from the besieged Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza City to a maternity hospital in Rafah, wore only nappies and tiny green hats. They were taken to Egyptian hospitals.

“Of those 31, 11 or 12 are critically ill, all the others seriously ill,” said Dr. Rick Brennan of the World Health Organization (WHO), in an interview with Reuters in Cairo.

“Each of them has serious infections and quite a few of them have a low body temperature and so they really do need detailed specialist care,” he said.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said 12 of the babies had been flown to Cairo.

The newborns have captured global attention since images emerged eight days ago of them lying side by side on beds at Al Shifa Hospital after their incubators were switched off for lack of power amid Israel’s military assault on Gaza City.

When doctors at Al Shifa raised the alarm about them, there were 39 babies. Since then, eight have died.

The story of al-Saik and her unnamed daughter provided some of the first personal details to emerge about the infants.

Al-Saik said just before the war started her baby had been receiving oxygen at Al Shifa because of breathing difficulties after her premature birth.

The family left their home on the third day of the war to escape Israeli bombardment. Like hundreds of thousands of others, al-Saik moved to the south of the Gaza Strip with her three other children, while the baby girl stayed at Al Shifa.

Family Torn Apart

With shortages of electricity, water, medicines and other basics, conditions at Al Shifa deteriorated and the baby lost weight and got sick.

“There was no milk and she kept getting worse, she was back to zero, to living on oxygen again,” said al-Saik.

The mother was reunited with her baby in Rafah, but to accompany her to Egypt, she said she had to leave her other children behind in Gaza.

“I didn’t even get a chance to hug them because I couldn’t leave my daughter in this state. I didn’t say goodbye to them. Something might happen to them, they could be bombed or martyred,” she said, her voice breaking as tears welled up.

Jeremy Hopkins, head of UNICEF in Cairo, told Reuters the agency was working with Egyptian authorities to find out the circumstances of each of the babies, including those who did not have relatives with them, so they could be provided with support beyond the immediate medical care.

Dr. Mohammad Salama, head of the neonatal unit at the Al-Helal Al-Emairati Maternity Hospital in Rafah where the babies spent Sunday night after arriving from Al Shifa, said the three who had remained behind were in a stable condition.

He said all 31 babies had been in a “catastrophic condition” when they arrived from Al Shifa and the hospital in Rafah had worked hard to stabilise them before their evacuation.

“Some were suffering from malnutrition, others from dehydration and some from low temperatures,” he told Reuters by telephone.

Salama said some of the babies were with their mothers, while others were accompanied by medical staff.

The war was triggered by fighters from Hamas who rampaged through southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing 1,200 Israelis, including children and babies, and abducting 240, according to Israeli figures.

Israel has responded with a relentless bombardment of Gaza and a ground invasion. At least 13,000 Palestinians, including 5,500 children, have been killed, according to health officials in the Hamas-controlled enclave of 2.3 million people. Three-quarters of Gazans have been made homeless by the war, according to U.N. figures.

London (Reuters) – Israel’s military offensive in Gaza that followed an Oct. 7 attack by the enclave’s ruling Islamist group Hamas has raised calls in the Middle East, particularly from OPEC member Iran, for using oil as a weapon to punish Israel.

The conflict has led many analysts, oil market watchers and politicians to draw parallels with the 1973 OPEC embargo, when Arab oil producers cut off oil exports to several allies of Israel, including the United States and Britain, following the Israeli-Arab war that year.

Analysts and OPEC sources, however, say that the energy world nowadays is far different from 50 years ago, playing down any possibility of a new embargo.

The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies led by Russia, or OPEC+, meet in Vienna on Sunday to decide on output policy, and sources have told Reuters that additional output cuts are likely to be discussed.

Where Are Calls For Embargo Coming From?

Last month, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian urged members of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to impose an oil embargo and other sanctions on Israel and expel all Israeli ambassadors.

Four sources from OPEC, which produces a third of the world’s oil and includes several Muslim states including Iran, told Reuters at the time that no immediate action or emergency meetings were planned by the group in light of Iran’s comments.

On Sunday, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appealed to Muslim states that have normalised relations with Israel to cut them for at least “a limited time”, weeks after he called for an Islamic oil and food embargo on Israel.

During a joint summit between members of the OIC and the Arab League in Riyadh on Nov. 11, Muslim states did not agree to impose wide-ranging sanctions on Israel, as requested by Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi.

What Happened Back In 1973?

In 1973, Arab OPEC producers led by Saudi Arabia imposed an oil embargo on the United States in retaliation for its support for Israel in the Middle East war in October of that year. The embargo, and subsequent output cuts, soon added other countries as targets, including the Netherlands, Britain and Japan.

The embargo led to severe shortages with long queues forming at gas stations. The negative impact on the U.S. economy was significant.

The embargo led to a spike in oil prices, but over the longer term the crisis encouraged the development of new oil provinces outside the Middle East like the North Sea and deepwater assets, as well as alternative energy sources.

Why Is Another Embargo Unlikely?

While Western countries were the main buyers of oil produced by Arab countries a half century ago, nowadays Asia is the main customer for OPEC’s crude, accounting for about 70% of the group’s total exports.

“The geopolitical environment is different compared to 50 years ago,” one OPEC source said about why a new embargo was not in prospect.

“A 1970s-style oil embargo by the Gulf oil-producing states appears unlikely because two-thirds of GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council) oil exports today are purchased by Asian clients and, importantly, the economic transformation currently planned and implemented in the region requires a sustained absence of conflict,” JPM Morgan said in a note.

Morgan Bazilian, director of the Payne Institute, said the energy landscape has changed substantially over the past 50 years. “The U.S. is now the largest producer of oil and gas, and has a long-established strategic petroleum reserve.”