TL;DR: help a Gazan family survive the winter and rebuild their lives.

The news and images coming out of Gaza have been both a heavy weight and a call to action. Social media has enabled direct connections with the people living there, real-time accounting of both immense suffering and stunning resilience. I came to know Mahmod through an activist working on the ground, and he has chronicled his experience from his old life as a proud dad and engineering student, to a homeless father desperately trying to evacuate his wife and three girls to the South.

The real-time connections of social media have spawned an entirely new system of international aid, fully dependent on individual donors combing through the desperate posts of individuals who try to present compelling stories, "stop the scroll," do or say anything to try to get money. Thousands of posts go out every day with messages like "We suffer every minute here. Life is so hard we can't bear it," "They killed the joy inside us. Our life has become like hell, help us please." Entire economies spring up around the few individuals with paypal or wise, who can accept donations and become the banking centers for entire compounds, the hubs of microeonomies. With aid still sparse and being withheld, the black market flourishes, and as of today, 10/14, it costs about $75 USD per day to feed a family of 5. This is the Hunger Games of Gaza.

Against this backdrop I have come to know and communicate with one family that I've grown to love, and hope to gather support for. Mahmod has three daughters: Rital, Revan and Ghazal. They are lucky; they have all survived the violence thus far, with losses limited to their family home, a young girl's ability to hear, a permanent limp. They also live with an aunty and her new baby, Yosef. It falls on Mahmod to care for 6 children, his wife and sister.

Like most Palestinians, he is eager to talk about life there: what it is, and what it was. We lived through the panic of evacuations and the suffering of relocations through his messages, and also understood his overwhelm at the support of the international community, his hope as the flotilla steadily advanced, his fears as Qatari and US emissaries negotiated terms. Recently, he wrote about his trip back North to see his home, which has been reduced to rubble.

We want for Mahmod's family what we want for every Palestinian family: to face this coming winter with the comfort of knowing they will have heat and water; to begin rebuilding on their land as soon as possible so that they can create a physical and psychological space for their children to begin to heal; to stave off, as permanently as we can, the specters of famine and maiming and homelesness that have been following them for years.

This, simply, requires money.

A full accounting of needs can be shared, but at a high level, $7000 will be enough to clear Mahmod's family land of the rubble of their old home, buy winter clothes and blankets, and create a makeshift shelter until they can actually begin to rebuild.

Please consider donating what you can, whether from alignment with humanitarian values, with the Palestininan cause for liberation, or simple affection for me:) The scale of the suffering is unimaginable, but here we have the opportunity to focus on one family and give the promise of comfort and dignity.

Sent with love and thanks,

Nadia