The above is the headline of an op-ed by Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish published in Canada’s daily Globe and Mail on August 1, 2025. Dr. Abuelaish is a gynecologist and fertility expert who was born in the Jabalia refugee camp in Gaza; he is now a professor at University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health. Dr. Abuelaish has given the Schiller Institute in Denmark permission to publish his opinion piece. Here is the beginning of the article:
“In most places, a mother’s womb is a sanctuary—a place of safety, warmth and beginning. In Gaza, however, it has become a battlefield. This war is not only being fought with bombs and bullets; it is being fought inside the bodies of women who carry life while surrounded by death, where it can even change how genes are expressed.
“As a physician, gynecologist and public health scholar, I have spent my life studying these mechanisms. As a Palestinian father who lost three daughters and a niece to Israeli shelling in 2009, I live this pain. I know what it means to bury children. And I know what it means to watch newborns inherit a world that has already betrayed them.
“But what haunts me more is now this pain can rewrite lives before they have even begun.
