By SAMY MAGDY and MARIAM DAGGA Updated 9:15 PM EDT, July 26, 2025
KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (AP) — A mother pressed a final kiss to what remained of her 5-month-old daughter and wept. Esraa Abu Halib’s baby now weighed less than when she was born.
On a sunny street in shattered Gaza, the bundle containing Zainab Abu Halib represented the latest death from starvation after 21 months of war and Israeli restrictions on aid.
The baby was brought to the pediatric department of Nasser Hospital on Friday. She was already dead. A worker at the morgue carefully removed her Mickey Mouse-printed shirt, pulling it over her sunken, open eyes. He pulled up the hems of her pants to show her knobby knees. His thumb was wider than her ankle. He could count the bones of her chest.
The girl had weighed over 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds) when she was born, her mother said. When she died, she weighed less than 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds).
A doctor said it was a case of “severe, severe starvation.”
No disrespect intended. What’s happening in Gaza is the most horrific event I’ve witnessed in my lifetime. But I have to ask, why would anyone there be creating people when their country has been getting bombed for the past year?
Sex feels good, and can be an escape from the relentless nihilism knowing that a bomb could fall on their heads tomorrow, or a bullet from an IOF officer takes them out.
Then, you have to think about contraceptives. If those aren’t abundant, people won’t use them, so more kids. Same is true for abortion care, which I doubt many Palestinians have after Israel bombed most if not all of Gaza’s hospitals.
Very good points!
are you suggesting that these people should be not creating new generations of palestinians? if that is your suggestion, maybe you should consider the goals of ethnic cleansing and how those two things potentially align
No. I’m not suggesting that nobody in PaIestine a should ever have children ever again.
In fact, I haven’t suggested anything.
I’m questioning why people in G aza specifically, which is an active warzone with no food or water, where kids are targetted with violence, would bring babies there.
I’m trying to gain insight into the situation and minds of the people there.
Children are being slaughtered. As a human being, I personally wouldn’t want to add to that. But that’s just me. I may be ignorant to the thinking of the people there.
there is incredible amount of human suffering. it is weird to he asking that question amongst all of that suffering. What are you suggesting they do if they become pregnant and all hospitals are filled with bombed people? What would you do in that situation? How would you seek your abortion that is the objectively morally correct choice according to you?
Don’t Become Pregnant.
i.e. comply with the genocide
Do you think they can reproduce faster than they’re being killed? They can defeat lsraeI by fucking? In a land that doesn’t even have drinking water?
I don’t think some of you grasp how devastated it currently is over there.
And to clarify again, I’m not talking about all of PaIestine. I’m talking about Ga2a.
I think Palestinian parents are not to blame for Israel being a baby killing ethnostate that’s trying to exterminate them.
You are literally advocating for compliance with genocide. Palestinians giving up on life and ceasing reproduction is Israel’s goal.
you are an idiot. an unempathetic idiot.
I don’t want to see any more children born into a short life of suffering. I don’t see how that’s unempathetic.
I doubt they have unlimited access to condoms and anti-baby pills.
“Why are the people trying to live a normal life while we murder them?”
That is the question in a nutshell.
your question should be why are you murdering them
That question is easy to answer. It is because the people in power are greedy sociopaths.
“In the first half of 2025, only 17,000 births were recorded, according to Gazan health authorities, representing a 41 per cent decline in Gaza’s birth rate over the past three years”
From a UN source. It also may have become increasingly difficult to keep track of births as the genocide progresses.
People like to have kids. Sex is pleasurable and family is fulfilling. To some extent we are biologically hardwired to procreate. I’m sure just as there are people who would never choose to have kids under any circumstances there are people who would always choose to have kids.
Thanks for actually adding some insight. I think the last part nailed it.
Oh shit buddy you really got fucked for that take lmao. I thought it was an interesting question about the external pressures that change the way someone or something decides on procreating.
Is there a choice to live in a concentration camp?
If they leave their homeland, they can never return while Israel keeps them from returning. So they try to have families because they won’t be driven from their land.
You are asking the wrong question though.
Why is Israel trying to bring about the destruction of an entire people?
The only one Israel isn’t trying to do is number 5 and that is probably be because they don’t want any Arabs of any sort alive.
Just in case it isn’t obvious, this has nothing to do with Judaism as a whole, it is the Israeli govt that is to blame not the religion itself.