For new parents, the aid crisis in Gaza is hitting hard

Left: A Palestinian mother holds her 5-year-old daughter suffering from malnutrition in Deir-el-Balah, Gaza, Dec. 24, 2024. Photo-illustration by Nora Berman/Eyad Baba/AFP via Getty Images; iStock

Deputy Opinion Editor Nora Berman May 29, 2025

“These days I really can’t nurse without thinking about Gaza, whether I want to or not,” Rabbi Emily Cohen told me.

Initially, Cohen struggled with breastfeeding her son, who was born in December. She feared she wouldn’t be able to produce enough milk for him, despite being safe at home in Brooklyn. “I can’t fathom being the mother of a newborn in Gaza who has nothing, who can’t produce breast milk because she doesn’t have enough to eat,” she said.

This week, the world saw thousands of desperate Palestinians converge on aid distribution hubs haphazardly set up by the newly established Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an aid group created by Israel to bypass Hamas, and staffed mostly with U.S. contractors. United Nations officials have repeatedly denounced the effort, as it replaces their hundreds of aid sites across the strip with only four, forcing Palestinians to walk for miles across military lines to get food. According to the World Health Organization, 57 children have reportedly died from acute malnutrition since the Israeli blockade began in March.

My son is seven months old, and though we too are safe at home no matter what we do together, I am also haunted by the thought of babies his age in Gaza, starving. When he nurses lustily, smacking his lips like the adorably loud eater that he is; when he smears 90% of the Greek yogurt we feed him on his face; when he makes me laugh; all the lovely intimate moments we’re having in the first year of his life are haunted by the image of a baby his age in Gaza crying for food.

There’s no comparing my life to the profound suffering that people in Gaza have endured for more than 600 days. My son and I are safe with plenty to eat. And yet I am not the only new parent of an infant — the postpartum period still so acute in so many ways — who is struggling with the number of dead or starving babies they scroll past all day, every day, online.

“I know a lot of new parents who are affected,” said Becca Strober, an Israeli-American parent and past Forward contributor, whose first child was also born last December. “There’s also the added layer of my son being born in Israel and this happening so close by. How can babies be starving 100 kilometers away from where I’m standing?”

“Right now it occurs to me many times a day that as I feed my daughter, someone else cannot feed their baby, and people who exist, who also have children, have the keys to make that stop,” Tim Bell, a dad in Arizona who had his first child last August, texted me. “And honestly, it’s hard for me not to feel some hatred towards them, on behalf of parents who I can identify with through the universal experience of loving their children.”

Cohen, Bell, Strober and I are not parenting in Gaza, but our exposure to the constant violence there is making our time with our children uniquely fraught. We fight to feel joy with our babies amid the guilt and helplessness that we cannot personally save each suffering child in Gaza we see on our phones. “If I could, I would run into Gaza and take them out,” Strober said.

Many of the parents with whom I spoke described living in this same strange duality of extreme joy and extreme despair. “Sometimes I hold him, and there’s this dissonance you can’t quite put to the side,” Strober said. “I’m looking at my kid and he’s healthy and he’s growing and developing. And he deserves all that because he’s just a baby. Because he’s a human in the world. But then, I have these flashes that if we were in Gaza, I don’t even know if he would be alive there.”

U.N. humanitarian chief Tom Fletcher told the BBC last week that 14,000 babies in Gaza would die within 48 hours if Israel did not end the more-than-two-months-long blockade and allow food and aid into the strip. Upon investigation, this statistic was walked back — an estimated 14,000 babies in Gaza would suffer from severe acute malnutrition over the next 11 months, not two days.

Right-wing publications and pro-Israel hawks seized upon this error, comparing it to accusations of “blood libel.” In my view, starving 14,000 babies over 11 months versus two days is a pretty morally hollow win.

The Israel-Hamas war is not the first time the violence of modern warfare has been livestreamed 24/7. But as we watch starving children on our phones under the covers in bed, the intimate spaces and moments of our lives with our new babies can constantly be permeated with death, and I worry that my innocent baby will absorb my grief. At the same time, I don’t want to let go of the images I’m seeing from Gaza, because I refuse to accept that these children’s suffering is normal or tolerable.

“Becoming a mother has made me softer and stronger at the same time,” Cohen told me, “but with that comes deep knowing that any child in the world deserves what my child has.”

Alicia Mountain, a poet and a friend of mine, had a suggestion for the next time I was with my son, battling joy and despair. “Maybe this is a really weird idea,” she wrote, “but do you ever think out loud with him?” My son is preverbal, but he knows my tone and can likely feel my emotions through my body, she said. “Inviting him into your thought process and how complicated those layers are might actually be calming and regulating for both of you.”

“Letting him know that his parent has feelings, sometimes conflicting feelings, sometimes grieving feelings,” she wrote, “and can still sustain him and protect him and delight in him” might be the best thing I could do for him in this moment as a parent.

Maybe loving all babies in a painful world is an act of hope.