Six-month-old Palestinian girl’s painfully emaciated body symbolised starvation in Gaza
Malak A Tantesh in Gaza and Julian Borger
Siwar Ashour, born in November, has only known war. Her mother, Najwa Aram, 23, gave birth in the one surviving room of a house that was otherwise destroyed and which 11 other people were sharing. Photograph: Doaa Albaz / Anadolu/Getty Images
Siwar Ashour was born into war and hunger and has known nothing else. She is now in real danger of dying without ever having known a moment of peace or contentment. The six-month-old Palestinian girl, whose painfully emaciated body symbolised the deliberate starvation of Gaza when she appeared on the BBC this week, was only 2.5kg when she was born on 20 November last year.
From birth, Siwar had a problem with her oesophagus that has made it hard for her to drink breast milk and left her dependent on specialised formula, which is in critically short supply.
Her parents’ home in al-Nuseirat, halfway up the coast on the Gaza Strip, was bombed earlier in the war, which began in October 2023 when Hamas killed 1,200 people in Israel, leading to an Israeli assault that has so far killed more than 52,000 people in Gaza. They lived in tents for a while but it was almost impossible to get food or water in the camp and it also came under Israeli fire.
They tried going back to al-Nuseirat to stay at Siwar’s grandparents’ home, but that was bombed, too. All that was left of the building was a single room, which they shared with 11 other people. That was where Siwar was born….
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
The Cross and the Pieta. The Passion of Palestine
A Massive Database of Evidence, compiled by a Historian, Documents Israel’s War Crimes in Gaza
Pankaj Mishra: The Shoah after Gaza
Juan Cole: Israel’s Gaza Atrocity by the Numbers
Rashid Khalidi: ‘Israel Has Created a Nightmare Scenario for Itself. The Clock Is Ticking’
After the truth-shower 