Tomorrow is International Women's Day. Not that it will make much difference to the women and children caught up in the spiral of violence in Israel andthe occupied territories. Helen Motro reports from Jerusalem
Arine Lifshitz celebrated her fifth birthday last week wearing a bulletproof vest. Karine is the daughter of Israeli settler Tamara Lifshitz, a nurse who commutes to work in Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital from her home in Israel's occupied territories.
Karine's life may have been saved because of that vest. In her mother's case, it was her nine-month womb and the unborn baby in it which protected against the bullet and shrapnel that entered her body.
Fired upon by Palestinians as they drove in their car in an attack which killed Karine's grandfather, Mrs Lifshitz was rushed to the hospital where in normal times she works as a nurse. There, a Caesarian section delivered a healthy baby, a sister for Karine.
A few miles away, two Palestinian infant girls were also born to mothers shot in their cars in separate incidents. These women were shot by Israeli soldiers apprehensive that the vehicles were transporting terrorists.
Both cars had been waved through roadblocks, only to be fired upon by other soldiers a little farther on. Accounts of why they began shooting differ, but these days fear makes the soldiers too quick on the trigger.
One mother, Shadiya Shehadah, was in labour when hit in the chest. When her daughter was born later that day, she named her Heba, "God's Gift". The other called her newborn Fida - Arabic for "sacrifice" - because the child came into the world a half orphan: her 22-year-old father, who was driving the car, was killed by the soldiers' bullets. The mother, Maysoun Hayek, was wounded.
Tamara Lifshitz was interviewed the day after her daughter was born and her father killed. Were she and Maysoun Hayek sisters in tragedy? she was asked. Mrs Lifshitz rejected any identification. "My father was murdered. What happened to them was an accident."
And Mrs Hayek was quoted as saying that when her baby grows up, she will tell her the story of what happened to her father.
Other women will not make it to International Women's Day tomorrow.
Sixteen-year-old Rachel Thaler, who was shot in a terror attack on February 16th while meeting her friends for pizza, died due to head wounds 10 days later. Her parents donated her organs to science.
And 21-year-old police rookie Galit Arviv was killed when police tried to storm a Palestinian who had opened fire with a rifle and threw hand grenades at people waiting at a Jerusalem bus stop.
This is what it means to be a woman in the Middle East.
A fortnight ago it was Shadiya Shehadah, Tamara Lifshitz and Maysoun Hayek who were struck. Tomorrow it might be any Jewish or Palestinian woman or their daughters, their mothers, their sisters, their aunts, their grandmothers.
Fida, Heba and baby Lifshitz entered this world by a miracle. It wasn't a maternal disease, an infection, or a congenital malformation that almost prevented their birth. Bullets ripped away the last hours of their peaceful life in the womb. On International Women's Day, the three baby girls will be almost a fortnight old. Their mothers will begin the journey of motherhood recuperating from much more than Caesarian sections. Mothers and daughters - all females caught in the violence.
Will these infants grow up without knowing each other, perhaps even hating the idea of one another? Or will there come a day when pregnant women in labour will not have to beg to be let through a checkpoint by soldiers trembling in their boots lest the car hides a knife to slit their throats? Is it too much to ask that women reach across the ideological abyss towards one another? By virtue of their numbers alone, women hold the keys to creating a world in which there is no longer a market for bulletproof vests to fit five-year-olds.
Helen Motro is an American lawyer and writer living in Israel, and a columnist for the Jerusalem Post