Shortly after midnight on January 1, the first baby born in 2024 at Hadassah Hospital Mount Scopus arrived. Liat and Federico Mena, residents of Kibbutz Ein Hashlosha near the Gaza border, welcomed a son.
Liat spent the last trimester of her pregnancy away from home, caring for her two small children alone as her husband served in the reserves.
“It was a stressful time,” she told ISRAEL21c. “When our son was born, I cried a real and liberating cry of happiness. After the birth, there is a feeling of victory and hope that we will return to build our home in the kibbutz. We wish for the new year that the people of Israel will continue to bring redemption to the world with the birth of sweet babies.”
About 17,000 babies were born in 2023 at Hadassah’s two Jerusalem hospitals, 1,430 in December alone. It was an all-time record for the hospitals and a 12 percent increase over 2022, an increase attributed to the fact that about 12,000 evacuees from Israel’s southwest and far north have been sheltering in the Jerusalem area since October 7, ISRAEL21c reports.