'Absolute cruelty' The baby girl who has come to symbolise Gaza's pain

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.

- Malak A Tantesh Gaza Julian Borger

The six-month-old Palestinian girl, whose painfully emaciated body symbolised the deliberate starvation of Gaza when she appeared on the BBC this week, weighed only 2.5kg (5.5lb) when she was born on 20 November last year. From birth, Siwar had a problem with her oesophagus which 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.

The couple lived in tents for a while but it was almost impossible to get food or water in the camp for the displaced and it also came under Israeli fire.

They tried going back to al-Nuseirat to stay with relatives, but that home was bombed too. All that was left of the building was a single room, which they shared with 11 other desperate people. That was where Siwar was born.

"I was exhausted all the time. There was no privacy, and I couldn't get any rest," Najwa Aram, Siwar's 23-year-old mother, said.

"There was no food or proper nutrition, and when I gave birth to her, she was not like other babies."

"When she was born, she was beautiful despite the weakness visible on her features," she said. "But now she is unnaturally thin. Babies her age are supposed to weigh 6kg or more - not just 2kg to 4kg."