A premature baby girl who had shocked Israelis when she suddenly showed signs of life after spending more than five hours in a morgue refrigerator died early on Tuesday in the northern Israeli hospital were she was born.

A senior gynaecologist who had helped deliver the 610-gram baby, born on Monday in the fifth month of her mother's pregnancy, had erroneously declared the girl stillborn because he had found no pulse.

Staff at the hospital in Nahariya near the Israel-Lebanon border then placed the baby in a refrigeration unit at the hospital's morgue, where she spent more than five hours. Her family later discovered signs of life when the baby was removed shortly before her scheduled funeral.

The baby grabbed her grandmother's finger and moved. Her parents, who had asked to look at her one last time, were shocked, and doctors rushed her to the hospital's neonatal intensive care unit.

"We felt that she was moving. She took my mother's finger and then also moved her lips," said the stunned mother, Faizah Majdub.

While the father, Ali Majdub, said the doctors had been "negligent in the speed with which they pronounced my daughter's death," the hospital's deputy administrator, Dr Moshe Daniel, spoke on Monday of a "miracle."

"In medicine, when we see something like this, we call it a 'medical miracle,' but at this point, we do not have an explanation," he told Channel 2 News.

Dr Rami Moshonov, a senior gynaecologist at a Tel Aviv hospital, told the television station that it was possible that the cold from the morgue refrigerator had slowed the baby's metabolism sufficiently for her to stay alive.

The baby's mother had checked into the hospital on Sunday in week 23 of her pregnancy with severe pain and haemorrhaging, said Ziv Parver, a spokesman for the Western Galilee Hospital in Nahariya.

She was wheeled to the delivery room when she went into labour prematurely, the spokesman told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The delivery team, including a senior gynaecologist, pronounced her baby's death after detecting no signs of life. Some 45 minutes after the birth the baby was removed to the hospital morgue, the spokesman said.

Israel's Health Ministry said it would investigate the incident and spokesman Parver said his hospital would fully cooperate with any inquiry.