KAB ELIAS, Lebanon (AP) — Trapped in her northern Syrian village by fighting, Mervat watched her newborn baby progressively shrink. Her daughter’s dark eyes seemed to grow bigger as her face grew more skeletal. Finally, Mervat escaped to neighboring Lebanon, and a nurse told her the girl was starving.

The news devastated her. “They had to hold me when they told me. I wept,” the 31-year-old mother said, speaking in the rickety, informal tent camp where she now lives with her husband in the eastern Lebanese town of Kab Elias.