The latest child to starve to death in Gaza weighed less than when she was born. The body of 5-month-old Zainab Abu Halib arrived at a hospital in southern Gaza on Friday and her family buried her on Saturday.

By SAMY MAGDY and MARIAM DAGGA Updated 9:15 PM EDT, July 26, 2025

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — A mother pressed a final kiss to what remained of her 5-month-old daughter and wept. Esraa Abu Halib’s baby now weighed less than when she was born.

On a sunny street in shattered Gaza, the bundle containing Zainab Abu Halib represented the latest death from starvation after 21 months of war and Israeli restrictions on aid.

The baby was brought to the pediatric department of Nasser Hospital on Friday. She was already dead. A worker at the morgue carefully removed her Mickey Mouse-printed shirt, pulling it over her sunken, open eyes. He pulled up the hems of her pants to show her knobby knees. His thumb was wider than her ankle. He could count the bones of her chest.

The girl had weighed over 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) when she was born, her mother said. When she died, she weighed less than 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds).

A doctor said it was a case of “severe, severe starvation.”

  • Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    24·
    13 hours ago

    No disrespect intended. What’s happening in Gaza is the most horrific event I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. But I have to ask, why would anyone there be creating people when their country has been getting bombed for the past year?

    • Fleur_@aussie.zone
      3·
      11 hours ago

      “In the first half of 2025, only 17,000 births were recorded, according to Gazan health authorities, representing a 41 per cent decline in Gaza’s birth rate over the past three years”

      From a UN source. It also may have become increasingly difficult to keep track of births as the genocide progresses.

      People like to have kids. Sex is pleasurable and family is fulfilling. To some extent we are biologically hardwired to procreate. I’m sure just as there are people who would never choose to have kids under any circumstances there are people who would always choose to have kids.

    • Mycatiskai@lemmy.ca
      4·
      12 hours ago

      Is there a choice to live in a concentration camp?

      If they leave their homeland, they can never return while Israel keeps them from returning. So they try to have families because they won’t be driven from their land.

      You are asking the wrong question though.

      Why is Israel trying to bring about the destruction of an entire people?

      In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

      1. Killing members of the group;
      2. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
      1. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
      4. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
      1. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

      The only one Israel isn’t trying to do is number 5 and that is probably be because they don’t want any Arabs of any sort alive.

      Just in case it isn’t obvious, this has nothing to do with Judaism as a whole, it is the Israeli govt that is to blame not the religion itself.