It will take a village to raise Reem, the baby whose entire family was killed in a strike

TEL AVIV — Baby Reem is hungry.

TEL AVIV — Baby Reem is hungry. She is 5 months old and grasping for her mother’s milk. She doesn't understand that her mother is dead, and she is the lone survivor of an airstrike that killed her entire family.

Reem Jehad Abou Haya was pulled from the rubble of her family’s home in the Gaza Strip city of Khan Younis on Aug. 12. It’s a miracle that she survived a strike that killed her parents, siblings and cousins, but a bittersweet one, as she now faces a life shadowed by their loss.

Her grandmother, Sayaeda Mohamed Husein Abou Haya, said 13 members of their family were killed in the strike.

Reem Jehad Abou Haya with her aunt Ayat.Bashar Taleb / AFP - Getty Images“They were sitting eating dinner, and a missile dropped on them, leaving no one alive,” Abou Haya said, as Reem, bandaged, scraped and burned, cried on her lap. “No one but the baby.”An aunt pulled Reem from her grandmother and tried to feed her from a bottle. She refused the formula and kept crying.

“The entire house fell on them, and they recovered their body parts,” Soaad Hosni Abou Haya, another of Reem’s aunts, said. “As you saw, their features are not shown, no head, no leg, they have no features, just body parts, just pieces — meat pieces.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/baby-reem-cries-for-dead-mother-family-killed-rcna166873

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