Two premature babies being cared for at the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza died before the evacuation of 31 others, the UN has said, adding that most of those who reached Egypt were “unaccompanied”.

The United Nations health agency helped evacuate 31 premature babies from the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City last week. Twenty-eight of those babies arrived in Egypt yesterday.

The other three babies moved from Al-Shifa in the north of the Gaza Strip are now in a hospital in southern Gaza and have their families with them.

“Two of these premature infants died only on that night because of the lack of care available to them,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told reporters in Geneva.

Meanwhile, Unicef said that 20 of the 28 babies evacuated to Egypt had been “unaccompanied”.