More than 11,000 pregnant women have been impacted by the escalated bombardment of Lebanon. Some 1,300 of them are expected to give birth in the next month, even as an estimated one quarter of the country’s infrastructure has been destroyed. The health system, already stretched before the current crisis, has been pushed to the brink – some 100 primary healthcare centres and dispensaries have closed, as have multiple hospitals.

The crisis in Lebanon has “taken on an entirely different nature and scale,” the United Nations Secretary-General said last week, uprooting over a million people, many of whom have crossed the border into also-embattled Syria. 

When shelling began in southern Lebanon, "we didn’t know where to go,” Soumaia told UNFPA, the United Nations sexual and reproductive health agency. “We had no family, no friends to turn to.”

She and her husband fled with their eight children – and Soumaia was pregnant at the time. Together, they headed towards Syria, a journey that took four days with little food, only to find the borders closed.