On Gaza
July 27, 2025
Photo via Mohammed Ibrahim on Unsplash
Yesterday on AP News I saw a photo of Zainab Abu Halib, a five month old baby who starved to death in Gaza. She weighed 4.4 pounds when she died.
Do you know how small a four pound baby is? My son weighed five pounds when he was admitted to the NICU at three days old. We have photos of him at that size, but I go out of my way not to look at them. I don’t like to remember when I thought he might die.
He’s three now, and he’s been asking a lot of questions about the circumstances of his birth. Why did he grow in my tummy. Why am I his mommy. Why was he born (“I didn’t ask for that,” he said on the way home from the park today).
I want to give him two answers to his question, but I only tell him one.
The first answer to his question is that he was born because I loved him before he even existed. He is here because I dragged him here kicking and screaming from the ether, the baby I conceived after two and a half years of trying.
On “Call Me Maybe,” Carly Rae Jepen sings, “Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad,” a lyric that has confounded many, myself included. But I get it now.
The other answer is that he’s lucky. Who knows why he got to be born a white American baby with access to a children’s hospital funded by Salesforce billionaire Marc Benioff. He just did. The universe assigned him to us, and now he gets to live in California and go to Costco and play Hot Wheels. I can't explain to him why he wasn't born in Gaza.
My son only spent a week in the NICU. Zainab Abu Halib’s parents watched her starve to death for five months.
I can’t stop thinking of her parents. I know they loved their child like I love mine. I know they manifested their love into a brand new human being, a bright light in a hopeless place, only to watch that miracle wither and die.
There is no excuse. As a Jewish person, I do not feel safer watching children starve to death. What’s happening in Gaza is genocide, it’s wrong, and it’s not antisemitic to say that.
My daughter just turned one and she’s a big baby. Squishy. 80th percentile for both height and weight.
Zainab Abu Halib deserved to be a fat baby, too.