Heart-rending footage shows dozens of premature babies being evacuated from Gaza’s largest hospital and carefully shuttled into Egypt for treatment Monday after Israeli forces seized the medical center in search of Hamas’ extensive underground tunnel network.

In the footage, broadcast by Egypt’s largest news channel Al Qahera, medical staff in masks and blue smocks gingerly move Gaza’s tiniest and most vulnerable patients out of ambulances and into mobile incubators.

The staff then carefully wheeled the incubators across a parking lot toward other ambulances for the next leg of the precarious journey across the Egyptian border.

The infants were born in north Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, where several other newborns died in recent weeks as power outages rendered medical personnel unable to provide the intensive care they required. Many of the newborns were suffering from dehydration, hypothermia and sepsis, Gaza hospitals director Mohamed Zaquot told AP.

Prior to their evacuation, the babies had been transported to a hospital in Rafah on Gaza’s southern border on Sunday so their conditions could be stabilized ahead of their journey into Egypt. The World Health Organization told Reuters that all of the evacuated babies were “fighting serious infections.”

The UN estimates more than 160 babies are delivered in Gaza each day. Born into a war zone, these innocent newborns and their mothers face unimaginable terror and hardship just to stay alive.

In an interview with The New York Times, Wajiha al-Abyad, 29, called her harrowing experience of giving birth in the midst of the war “a nightmare in every sense of the word, or something like a horror film.”

Noor Hammad, one of the estimated 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza, has had to forego any semblance of essential prenatal testing in light of the conflict.

“The last time I was able to check on my baby’s health was a month before the war started,” she told the Times.

Al-Shifa has been the site of a concerted military campaign in recent days as Israeli soldiers descended on the hospital looking for evidence to prove that Hamas terrorists had been using it as a base of operations.

On Wednesday, Israel officials claimed they found “concrete evidence” of the terror group operating a military facility beneath the hospital during an overnight raid. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) released photos showing a jaw-dropping cache of weapons and combat gear recovered during the search.

“These assets in Shifa hospital, just like in Rantissi, prove that hospitals have been used for military purposes for terror, in direct opposition to international law,” IDF spokesman Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said.

However, the Israeli siege of al-Shifa has come under intense global scrutiny as video and images have been broadcast showing doctors frantically trying to care for wounded civilians, including children and even babies.

Gaza’s Hamas-run government says at least 5,500 children in Palestinian territory have died in the war so far.