KUALA LUMPUR: A Palestinian grandmother has only one wish for her one month-old twin granddaughters - to be in a clean, safe room, away from the war where they can be bathed.
Instead, the infants, Alma and Salma, are living in a tent where they could only drink formula milk and are never bathed.
According to Reuters, their mother cannot breastfeed them because she is not getting enough nutrition for her body to produce milk, and they have never been bathed.
Their grandmother Um Mohammed al-Jadba struggles every day to find water to make them bottles of formula milk where she would boil the water in a thermos flask on a fire outside the tent.
"There is no nutrition (for the mothers), nor food for them to eat, how can they breastfeed? There is nothing for them to eat. Every day I feed them thyme, there is nothing else for them to eat.
"They are a month old now, and have not been bathed yet. Do you see the space they are living in?" she told Reuters while holding a baby in the crook of each arm as she sat inside the tent.
Alma and Salma are part of a generation of Gaza babies born into homeless, destitute families struggling to survive the Israeli attack.
Al-Jadba said four babies in her family had been born into displacement since the start of the war where her daughter-in-law gave birth to a girl, then her sister-in-law had a boy, and Alma and Salma who were born to her other daughter-in-law.
She said it was a struggle to feed all of them, and their whole family was hungry.
"Our hope was for these children to be born in a safe place, without air strikes, without wars, without the displacement these children are experiencing," said al-Jadba.
One of the babies was fast asleep, dressed in a white sleepsuit decorated with colourful butterflies and wrapped in a turquoise blanket.
The other was in a plain white sleepsuit and pink blanket, looking around her with big eyes, waving her tiny fists around and turning her face towards her grandmother when she spoke.
"They should be born in a secure place, in a clean room, for them to be bathed. What fault did these children commit?" she said.
The family had first moved from Gaza City to Khan Younis, the main city in southern Gaza. The twins were born there, in Nasser hospital.
They were then forced to move again to Rafah as Israel had begun focusing their ground assault in the south.
