TEL AVIV — Baby Reem is hungry. She is 5 months old and grasping for her mother’s milk. She doesn’t understand that her mother is dead, and she is the lone survivor of an airstrike that killed her entire family.
Reem Jehad Abou Haya was pulled from the rubble of her family’s home in the Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis on Aug. 12. It’s a miracle that she survived a strike that killed her parents, siblings and cousins, but a bittersweet one, as she now faces a life shadowed by their loss.
Her grandmother, Sayaeda Mohamed Husein Abou Haya, said 13 members of their family were killed in the strike.
“They were sitting eating dinner, and a missile dropped on them, leaving no one alive,” Abou Haya said, as Reem, bandaged, scraped and burned, cried on her lap. “No one but the baby.”
An aunt pulled Reem from her grandmother and tried to feed her from a bottle. She refused the formula and kept crying.
“The entire house fell on them, and they recovered their body parts,” Soaad Hosni Abou Haya, another of Reem’s aunts, said. “As you saw, their features are not shown, no head, no leg, they have no features, just body parts, just pieces — meat pieces.”
It will now take a village to raise Reem, and her story is not unique. Around 17,000 children are unaccompanied or have been separated from their parents since the start of the war in Gaza, according to UNICEF.
A report released Friday by the International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental organization, warned that the actual number may be higher, and said “the risk of family separation has increased dramatically in the past months, exacerbated by multiple rounds of displacements, arrests, Israeli evacuation orders and fatalities.”
Children have been found living alone in hospitals, the IRC said, adding that caregivers and professionals have reported that “children in shock in Gaza are seeking comfort, clinging to others during loud sounds, wetting the bed, having nightmares, and are wanting to sleep under the bed to feel secure.”
And the impacts are likely to continue even after the war ends. “Ongoing toxic stress from violence and displacement can lead to long-term health challenges for children,” the report said. Without support, “there is a significant risk of long-term developmental impacts, including on brain development.”
More than 40,000 people, including thousands of children, had been killed in Israel’s monthslong military offensive in the Gaza Strip as of Thursday, according to local health officials. The Health Ministry in Gaza has said that at least 115 newborns have been killed since the war began.
In the same 24-hour period Reem lost her family, newborn twins and their mother were killed in a strike while their father was picking up their birth certificates.
These strikes followed a deadly weekend of strikes, after a school-turned-shelter in Gaza City was targeted by the Israel Defense Forces, killing at least 100.
The doctors at Nasser Hospital who examined Reem said her injuries were superficial, and they can’t keep her admitted because of the risk of cross infection, but said if she doesn’t drink soon, she will become dehydrated.
“She’s looking for her mother,” Dr. Ahmad Alfra said. “She’s refused any kind of feeding.”
Alfra has witnessed months and months of death and suffering but describes Reem’s situation as “one of the most catastrophic stories we have ever seen in this war.”
He asked one of Reem’s aunts to try and find another mother who is lactating; perhaps Reem would take her milk.
NBC News reached out to the IDF for comment. It did not address the specific incident but said it was “operating to dismantle Hamas military and administrative capabilities.”
“Her destiny, of course I will take her; I am her aunt,” Soaad Hosni Abou Haya told NBC. “She is not the first child in Gaza to live without a father or mother. She will live as an orphan. There are many cases like that. She is not the first and won’t be the last one.”
As for her future, Soaad said, whatever fate faces Gaza’s children will be Reem’s fate as well. But first, she must eat.
