In a heartbreaking picture that has been going viral on social media, a Palestinian man is seen scaling up a hospital wall to bid goodbye to his mother through the window before she dies of the novel coronavirus.

The 30-year-old man, identified as Jihad Al-Suwaiti, from the town of Beit Awa in the West Bank climbed up the window of the Intensive Care Unit of Hebron State Hospital, where his mother was being treated for COVID-19. He was apparently desperate as he had no other choice left. His mother, Rasmi Suwaiti (73) had been under treatment for leukaemia and Covid-19 for nearly 5 days before she breathed her last. "The son of a Palestinian woman who was infected with COVID-19 climbed up to her hospital room to sit and see his mother every night until she passed away," a CEO and human rights activist wrote on social media. Regarding the heartbreaking incident, Jihad had reportedly mentioned, "I sat helplessly behind the outside window of the intensive care room, watching her last moments."

COVID-19 has claimed the lives of more than 609,600 people and infected over 14,673,685 people across the world. The virus was first identified in Wuhan, Hubei Province, in China. As the death toll and overall cases began rising rapidly across the world, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global health emergency and the outbreak was labelled a pandemic.