She was born amid war, in a hospital with no electricity in a southern Gaza city that has been bombarded daily. Her family named her al-Amira Aisha — “Princess Aisha”.
She didn’t complete her third week before she died, killed in an Israeli airstrike that crushed her family home on Tuesday.
Her extended family was asleep when the strike levelled their apartment building in Rafah before dawn, said Suzan Zoarab, the infant’s grandmother and survivor of the blast. Hospital officials said 27 people were killed, among them Amira and her two-year old brother, Ahmed.
“Just 2 weeks old. Her name hadn’t even been registered,” Suzan said, her voice quivering as she spoke from the side of her son’s hospital bed, who was also injured in the blast. The family tragedy comes as the Palestinian death toll in Gaza nears 20,000, according to the health ministry.
The Zoarab family were among the few Palestinians in Gaza who remained in their own homes. Israel’s onslaught, one of the most destructive of the 21st century, has displaced some 1.9 million people sending them in search of shelter in UN schools, hospitals, tent camps or on the street.
But the Zoarabs stayed in their three-storey apartment building. Two of Suzan’s sons had apartments on higher floors, but the extended family had been crowding together on the ground floor, believing it would be safer. When the strike hit, it killed at least 13 members of the Zoarab family, including a journalist, Adel, as well as displaced people sheltering nearby.
“We found the whole house had collapsed over us,” Suzan said.