BEIRUT: Two-year-old Emir Al Bash’s blood still showed on his mother’s hand as she sat in a medical centre in Syria’s besieged eastern Ghouta where his body was taken after he died from a shellblast.

His family had left their home in the village of Kafr Batna on Monday for a market in a nearby village, seeking food for their malnourished children, but a mortar shell landed close to them, instantly killing the boy.

“My child died hungry. We wanted to feed him. He was crying from hunger when we left the house,” said the mother, Heba Amouri. Emir is the second child she has lost since the war began six years ago.

After Emir’s death, Amouri tried to quiet her surviving baby, a hungry two-month-old girl, by placing her finger in her mouth at the medical centre. Malnutrition means she is unable to breastfeed, she said.

“Now I lost my second child. My baby daughter is the only surviving child,” Mahmoud Al Bash, 27, Emir’s father said. A year ago, the family lost another son to the bombardment.