We talk a lot about food parcels. Hot meals. Clean water.
Today I want to talk about the babies, because they’re having a different war to everyone else.
An adult in Gaza understands what’s happening to them. That’s not nothing. A woman who hasn’t eaten properly in weeks still knows why, still knows there’s a reason, still has somewhere to put it. Even the older children know. They’ve learned to wait, and to share, and to say they’re not hungry so a smaller one can eat.
A three-month-old has none of that.
He doesn’t know there’s a war. He doesn’t know there’s a queue, or a border, or a reason. He has no concept of later.
He just knows something is wrong inside him, and that it hasn’t stopped, and that the person who always fixes it isn’t fixing it.
That’s his entire experience of the world right now.
And he does the only thing he can do, which is cry. Which is how a baby asks. It’s his only word and he uses it, over and over, and nothing comes.
Until he stops.
That’s the part people don’t know. A starving baby eventually goes quiet. Not because anything improved, but because crying costs energy he no longer has. The same with moving. He goes still. He stops reaching.
In a ward full of malnourished infants, the quiet ones are the ones the nurses go to first.
And then there’s the cold.
A baby can’t regulate his own temperature. Adults can. We shiver, we move, we burn something to warm ourselves. An infant can’t do any of that. He has a small store of fat whose entire job is to make heat, and he relies on it completely.
When there’s no food coming in, the body starts consuming itself. Fat first. That store goes.
So he has no heat left to make.
Which means a hungry baby in Gaza is cold all the time. Not cold because of the weather. Cold from the inside, with nothing left to burn, in a tent, in winter, on the ground.
And his mother can hold him against her body all night and it won’t be enough, because you cannot warm a child from the outside when there’s no fuel in him. She’ll do it anyway. She’ll hold him all night.
That’s why formula matters so much to us.
Because a starving mother cannot produce milk. That’s not a failure of love or effort, her body simply has nothing left to make it from. She would give him anything. There’s nothing there to give.
And formula is the one thing on our list that can’t be substituted.
A food parcel can be shared out. A hot meal can be split between people. Water goes round. But you cannot give a three-month-old a portion of rice. There is exactly one thing that will keep that baby alive, and either it reaches him or it doesn’t.
So our team is getting it in. Alongside the meals and the water and everything else. Formula, into the hands of mothers who have run out of options, in those camps, this week.
Winter is here. The babies who make it through the next three months will be the ones who had something to burn.
Please help us keep it going.
For the ones too small to understand any of it,
Hafsa