This girl is trying to keep her family alive in Gaza. Hunger already killed her baby niece
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/20/middleeast/gaza-hunger-jana-israel-blockade-intl-cmd
The bright pink jumper with a picture of Cinderella hangs off Jana’s skinny shoulders as she walks through the northern Gaza moonscape, piles of rubble, dirt and dust all around her. Clutching a large tub in her hand, the 12-year-old is on a mission: find food and water.
Jana Mohammed Khalil Musleh Al-Skeifi and her family say she has been responsible for getting supplies for them all since an Israeli sniper killed her older brother more than a year ago. Her parents are in poor health, so it now falls on her to provide for them.
“I don’t want my father to get tired. That’s why I’m strong. I want to be strong, so my father doesn’t suffer,” Jana told CNN while waiting in a queue at a water distribution spot in Gaza City. “My father is elderly and has heart disease. If he tries to carry the bucket, he’ll fall.”
Jana's family live in a half destroyed building in Gaza City. They fled there after their home was destroyed.
Doctors without Borders, the humanitarian organization, said that more than two-thirds of the 1,700 water and sanitation items it sought to deliver to Gaza between January 2024 and early March 2025 were rejected by Israeli authorities.
“You can barely fill one bucket, because there’s no proper queuing system, and if you wait, you might not get anything. Sometimes we have to go without,” Jana said. “I sit there for hours just waiting to fill one bucket. It’s an awful feeling.”
The family told CNN it has resorted to using salt water to clean and cook in the past.
The hunger is becoming catastrophic. The Ministry of Health in Gaza said that at least 57 children have died from the effects of malnutrition since the start of the war. Jana’s baby niece Janat was one of them, her family says.
While Janat was born small, weighing just 2.6 kilograms (5 lb 12 oz), her mother Aya told CNN the baby girl was growing and putting on weight. She became a healthy baby, reaching a weight of around 4 kilograms (8 lb 13 oz). She learned to smile, she was alert.
But things changed when Janat was six weeks old.
On March 2, Israel imposed its total blockade on Gaza, preventing even the most basic supplies, including baby formula and medicines, from entering the strip.
Aya said that when food became scarce, she began to struggle to breastfeed Janat, who started to lose weight. The baby developed chronic diarrhea, became dehydrated and was soon so poorly that she needed medical attention.
“(At the hospital) they said there was a special medical milk that would help her gain weight and stop the diarrhea — but we couldn’t find it. We searched all over Gaza, hospital by hospital, pharmacy by pharmacy. Even the Ministry of Health told us it wasn’t available,” Aya told CNN.
A CNN video of Janat from mid-April shows the tiny baby wrapped up and held tightly by Aya. Her tiny face is all bones beneath the skin, and she looks more like a newborn than a four-month-old. Her skinny, long fingers are poking out of the blanket, and she looks sleepy. Her big brown eyes are the only part of her exhausted body that seem able to move, her gaze following people as they move around her.
Jana plays with her baby niece Janat on April 12. Janat died of the effects of malnutrition three weeks after this video was filmed
At the same time, Janat’s mother was struggling too, weakened by the lack of food and clean water. Like many new mothers in Gaza in these conditions, she lost her milk – leaving her unable to feed her baby. The UN-backed hunger report said that almost 11,000 pregnant women in Gaza are already at risk of famine, and nearly 17,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women will need urgent treatment for acute malnutrition over the coming months.
Janat kept deteriorating. Her mother told CNN the baby began to struggle to maintain her body temperature and doctors said her blood sugar level was dangerously low. Her oxygen levels were dropping. The malnutrition caused her kidneys and liver to malfunction and her blood became acidic as a result.
“I pleaded to the whole world to save her. I just wanted someone to save her, to provide the milk she needed. But no one could help. Everyone was just watching,” Janat’s mother said.
Janat’s mother told CNN that doctors at the hospital had recommended Janat for medical evacuation abroad. The family even managed to obtain the necessary paperwork, including a referral and a permit for Janat to leave.
But the baby girl died on May 4, before that was possible. At four months old, she was only 2.8 kilograms (6 lb 3 oz), barely more than her birth weight.
Medical evacuations from Gaza have been extremely rare, even more so since Israel restarted military operations after the collapse of the ceasefire in March.
The World Health Organization (WHO) said last week that some 12,000 patients in Gaza need medical evacuation, and that only 123 people have been evacuated since hostilities restarted in March.
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