If Success is Flight, Then Faith is my Wings. When you know what you need to do, all that's left is the courage to do it. This is a personal blog,where you will find Islamic quotes,regular wisdom,some...
i feel obligated to talk about this bc i am egyptian and one of the central reasons people from gaza have been fundraising is because of egypt's border policy, which is no longer active since the rafah border was destroyed
i know nothing gets people more heated or self-righteous than the idea that they might be getting scammed, and i know the gofundmes here can be overwhelming in your inboxes and i know for many people in the west who want some kind of reliable process this can seem sketchy but palestinian bloggers on here (and palestinians across platforms including on gazafunds.com) don't want you to be scammed any more than you want to be scammed, and they have put in an extraordinary effort to verify information literally in the middle of a warzone
the truth is you all have no idea how difficult this entire process is from top to bottom, tech companies and fintech companies literally hate anything that passes through this area. i'm banned from uber and doordash because i used an egyptian credit card while travelling and it flagged their automated fraud systems and they never reinstated it lol like that's how arbitrary it is. and egypt is one of the better-connected countries in the area.
the entire reason people in gaza are relying on gofundmes is because the barriers to entry and exit are not accidental—they're deliberate! this is literally what being occupied and middle-eastern means. it means you don't have easy access to bank accounts, you don't have easy access to fundraising, you don't have easy access to your own records, and you are automatically mistrusted by the world at large of how thoroughly dehumanized your language and your people have been during a genocide where you are being bombed and living in a tent. this is also part of what it means to be a refugee from the global south or to be a refugee from the global north, where these processes are expedited (as they were for ukrainian refugees, for example) precisely because they are part of the structure of a war.
like just to explain to you guys how difficult it was for me (someone with access to networks across the world) to get money to a friend in gaza, because egypt's also going through an economic crisis and transferring usd here is close to impossible: to get 15k usd (enough to get 3 people out of gaza) to the office in egypt that registers people for evacuation, that family needed
a stable internet connection to communicate with us (they were only able to get in touch briefly every other day)
first-degree relatives in egypt to register for them
people from abroad who could raise the money for them (which they did; they were family friends who knew them)
an egyptian with a usd bank account and a foreigner coming to egypt who could carry usd in cash to divide it among themselves because there is no other way to receive that amount of money here at once
we managed to get the money to their relatives here, they managed to register them, and then the rafah border was destroyed. so now the are just waiting while being bombed and displaced from one area to another. and this is a family who had every connection needed. imagine how it is for people where only one of these links are dropped?
that's why the work the palestinian bloggers do here to support palestinians in gaza is necessary, because they fill in for people who don't have good language skills, who don't have friends abroad to fundraise or vouch for them, who don't have relatives in egypt who can receive money for them, etc
does this mean every fundraiser is 100% reliable? no. this is why the verification list exists! the things i would be wary of would be if someone sends you a false or phishing link, or if someone who is running the campaign from abroad decides to scam the palestinians they're raising it for and refuse to send the money, both of which i've witnessed personally
but the likelihood of someone faking being from gaza and getting onto the verified list is much smaller because the verification process is rigorous and like i said, palestinians themselves don't want to be promoting scams. but also most of these gofundmes protect your donation, meaning if someone disputes it you get your donation back. they are paranoid to the extent that they will sometimes refuse to pay out people in gaza even after the campaign goal is reached for no reason except that anything from the middle east is generally regarded with suspicion. i've seen paypal also refuse to do the same
as a matter of fact from a tech standpoint it's so, so much easier for someone located in the west to create a fake gofundme/phishing scam than for a palestinian to do so, but by that token it's more difficult for someone in the west to convincingly fake being from gaza. which is why the verification list and other initiatives (like again, gazafunds.com) are so important
i have tried to get gofundmes on gazafunds before and i can promise you their process is rigorous. you might not see a lot of the paperwork behind a specific campaign but i know they don't add campaigns unless they verify their IDs personally or through a network of trusted references. the bloggers on here are a volunteer network working independently, of their own effort, and they are doing their best in what is a genuinely horrible situation. the border is closed now but people in gaza have worked out alternate ways to receive money raised online (again, often via relatives transferring to each other outside gaza or other means) and aid hasn't been coming in for months and those regulating the aid were killed, which means extremely limited supplies and high inflation, so money raised and received now is literally survival money that goes wherever it can, and people are very desperate to raise as much as possible as things get more dire. there is no employment in gaza right now. people have been living off their savings for ten months.
is that simple to convey to some blogger on tumblr donating 5$ to a gofundme? is it simple to understand? no. and that's part of the structure of genocide. you aren't going to be able to venmo someone and get a receipt like you do if you're donating to an org, so volunteers are doing their best to fill in the gaps for that by making sure you know how your money is helping real human beings while relieving the pressure on these humans, in a genocide with limited internet, to constantly post about themselves.
the fact of the matter is that your risk of being scammed by a gofundme from the verified list or gazafunds dot com is extremely low, but the damage of of assuming (and even worse, claiming) these campaigns are a scam is extremely high
if you don't trust a campaign, don't donate to it. if you notice a red flag you feel like the bloggers verifying might have missed, alert them to it. if you notice someone impersonating one of the verified campaigns on here (also common) alert people to it. i often have difficulty identifying which blogs are legitimate because they are deleted and remade so frequently, so i just try to reblog posts from the verified list or promoted by palestinians bloggers as i donate to them.
don't cast doubt on the process if you don't understand it, and don't be cruel about a situation you should pray you never experience—and odds are, if you have a US passport and a US bank account, you never will.
sometimes people DO use stock images to explain their situation, like "this is the area i'm in" or "this is an example of what's happening to me" because they feel like those images are more descriptive, they don't want to use images from their real lives for privacy reasons, or they don't have a good camera or a good connection to send their own images. i have seen this happen with a few people i know personally, some of whom were able to describe this ("the image used is just an example") but some of whom were unaware that they needed to do so. so this criteria unfortunately is not always helpful, unless someone is obviously trying to pass off a stock image as their own or lying about it.
more than once palestinians i met in cairo in person have shared a gofundme that they've started and they'll say "a nice person online helped me set this up" or "a friend of a friend got one so we set up ours" because that's how these have worked so far, and i look at them and i know they seem fake or unconvincing because they don't have enough images or they don't have enough descriptions.
conversely, a lot of people have learned to over-embellish instead to make it seem more convincing and appeal to more people, which has clearly had the opposite effect here.
a lot of times i've thought, "if i didn't vouch for this nobody would believe this was a real fundraiser" and that's particularly why i found those posts so casually dismissive and ignorant. unless you've been in this situation or have tried to help fundraise, you won't understand how harmful and generally unproductive these "watch out for scams" posts were.
this is why you shouldn't take these "i vouch for this fundraiser" posts lightly, because this is literally all there is to it. yes, you might not know that blogger so that is meaningless to you, in which case—fine! it's not meant for you! it's meant for that person's following, who do know them and have known them.
some of the posts in your inbox are spam but not all—they are people completely unfamiliar with this website who heard it's a good place to fundraise trying to fundraise in any way possible, usually by going through the notes of a popular post and messaging people there with a stock appeal for help. they don't have success with everyone they send to, and certainly some are scammers taking advantage (more than a few of which palestinian bloggers were the first to notice and warn against). these are people for whom social media is also entirely hostile and it's also grown more difficult to fundraise on twitter and meta because palestinians keep getting shadowbanned, and so they use social media as a tool and not as a hobby. this includes strategies like mass-messaging and appeals to humanity, because they're not here to make friends or blog. they're here to fundraise.
most of all if you don't feel comfortable with it, then just ignore it! there is no need to absolve your guilt of ignoring these messages by deciding they're all scams, and there was absolutely no need to smear the bloggers who do participate in this without understanding what they do. i said above if you feel confident that something is a scam (especially if you are familiar with the situation, less so if you know jack shit about it), you should message the bloggers who have vetted it and ask because they don't want to be promoting scammers either. there is no shortage of other ways to help, and there is no shortage of people who need help.
“The difference between comfort and nurture is this: if you have a plant that is sick because you keep it in a dark closet, and you say soothing words to it, that is comfort.If you take out of the closet and put in the sun, give it something to drink, and then talk to it, that is nurture”
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype
The tipping point has already occurred, unfortunately, for a large number of children and infants and toddlers and adolescents — these are definable age categories where the level of starvation and malnutrition has passed the tipping point, where July already saw a large escalation in the number of deaths but August is going to be significantly higher because a lot of the children have already passed the point of no return where their physiology has eroded to the point where even refeeding could potentially cause death itself. The gut lining has started to auto-digest and it will no longer have adequate absorptive capacity for water or for nutrition. Death is unfortunately imminent for probably thousands of children.
[...]
In August and September, there are probably still going to be extremely high lethality and large numbers of deaths because children have already passed the tipping point. If we start getting in large quantities of the correct formula and the correct protein and food in general, we may be able to decrease deaths in late September, October and going forward. There’s an international gradation called the “global acute malnutrition” score or GAM — we’re already at greater than 15% [of Gaza’s 1 million children meet that criteria]. Severe acute malnutrition, between 5% and 10% of children already meet that criteria. Then for moderate acute malnutrition, 20% of the children under 5 meet this.
[...]
When I was in the emergency department, I spent most of my time in the resuscitation room where we were taking care of complex, unstable trauma patients. For adults, the average body fat percentage was probably 1%, if that; really, many of them were skeletal. We were doing emergency surgical procedures on people where all of the ribs were completely showing — there was no problem getting between ribs to put in chest tubes.
Trauma in this environment is a chronic illness so we would see people with acute severe injuries who were already healing from injuries that occurred three months ago. So we would see people that had a chest tube who on the other side you could see they had a festering wound from a chest tube they had had months earlier … due to the lack of nutrition and the lack of protein, [including] albumin, which is critical for healing wounds. Even if you’re not injured, walking around in this destroyed environment, you get cuts and scrapes all the time. So people just were covered in minor cuts and scrapes that were not healing; they had secondary infections and no clean water to wash their wounds.
We had so many family members who would show up with patients that had acute traumatic injury but the family members themselves were almost incoherent, where they were malnourished to the point where they couldn’t speak and think properly. They were stumbling and falling and passing out.
[...]
This was a residency training program but really the residents were running the show because the senior attendings are very few and far between — a lot of them have been killed or are missing. In the past, they were paid a little bit of money every three to four months but it is not enough; their families are starving.
These physicians were being fed a small amount of food once a day. Three weeks ago, that stopped. They are now completely on their own. There have been physicians and nurses who have simply passed out in the middle of the emergency department; there are people passing out during surgery. This is a completely new phenomenon in the last three weeks. When we were there, every person on our team lost between 12 and 15 pounds.
[...]
Nothing but a trickle [of aid] has made it into Gaza from March to the time I left… And these so-called aid distribution points [set up under the U.S.- and Israeli-supported Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, established earlier this year and defended by Israeli troops and American military contractors] — it was like clockwork: 30-40 minutes after they started a distribution, we would just hear ambulances and cars flying in, we would receive many, many patients after these things. [The GHF denies enabling violence.]
One of the things I thought was really remarkable was how young the people were coming in from these. These were young boys who were being heroic and going to these things despite the knowledge that they were a shooting gallery. I can’t tell you how many boys between the ages of 8 and 18 I saw with a bullet wound directly between the eyes, the forehead or the side of the temple.
It was almost like they were changing the game sometimes because we’d get all head injuries, then we’d have several hours or a day of all neck injuries, or all chest. Or all groin injuries which are particularly terrible, because there are major blood vessels everywhere; people often bleed out, they usually have a fairly slow death and injure the bowel or the rectum so there are feces-soaked injuries which are extremely painful and difficult to manage. [The IDF maintains that it respects the laws of war and minimizes harm to civilians.]
Past ‘The Point Of No Return’: Doctor Gives On-The-Ground Insight Into Starvation In Gaza
“لن تستطيعي أن تجدي الشمس في غرفة مغلقة You can’t find the Sun in a locked room”
—
Ghassan Kanafani ( 1936 – 1972 ) was a Palestinian writer and a leading member of thePopular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. He was assassinated at age 36 by car bomb in Beirut by the Mossad.
My name is Mosab, and I’m writing this with honesty and humility.
I live in Gaza, where war has taken nearly everything from me — my home, my safety, and 25 members of my family, including my beloved mother, siblings, and their children. I’ve been displaced multiple times. Every day here is a struggle to survive.
In the face of this, I turned to the internet — not because I wanted to beg, but because I truly had no other way.
🧭 What Happened
A few months ago, a friend helped me create a GoFundMe campaign:
🔗 https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-saving-whos-left-of-my-family
Unfortunately, I could not continue working with the person who set it up. As a result, it was closed — and I had to start over again, this time on Chuffed, where I could manage everything myself.
I am the same person behind both campaigns — same story, same face, same truth. I only changed platforms to regain control and transparency.
💔 Why I Created Multiple Campaigns
I didn’t just make one campaign. I also helped create campaigns for my loved ones:
My wife Nadin, who’s caring for our 11-month-old daughter in these terrible conditions
My brother Abedmajed, and his wife Saja
My nephew Naser lost his mother (my sister) and his sister in a missile strike that hit our family home. That same strike also killed:
My mother
My other sister
My older brother, his wife and their daughters - all gone
My uncle, his wife, their sons, and grandchildren — all erased as well
That home was the heart of our family. And in one moment, it was gone — along with so many people I loved.
Naser, still a teenager, now takes care of his three younger brothers alone. His life — like mine — was shattered in an instant.
We are all in Gaza. We are all real. And we are all trying to rise, together.
⚠️ My Mistake
At the beginning, I made a big mistake.
I was so desperate to get our stories seen that I created multiple Tumblr accounts to send messages and reach more people. I didn’t understand that this would upset users or lead to the campaigns being flagged as spam.
I see now how that felt for others. And I am deeply sorry.
I never meant to deceive or annoy anyone. I was simply trying to survive — and to help my family survive. But I know now that good intentions don’t excuse bad methods.
🔁 What I’m Doing Now
I’ve spoken directly with Chuffed.
I’ve closed all old campaigns.
I’m keeping this account — @mosabsdr — moving forward.
I will be creating new, respectful, honest campaigns for myself and my loved ones.
I will reach out to GazaVetters again to explain and hopefully clear any misunderstandings.
🌱 Moving Forward
From this point on, everything I share will come from the heart — no pressure, no spamming, no noise. Just our truth, told with honesty and dignity.
If you’ve followed me, donated, or shared anything in the past: thank you from the bottom of my heart.
If you were hurt or bothered by how I reached out before — I truly understand. I hope you can see that I’m learning, and trying to do better.
This war has destroyed so much — but we are still here, and we are still rising.
My name is Mosab Elderawi.I live in Gaza. And I’m trying to start again after losing more than I ever thought possible.
If you wish to stay with us on this journey, I welcome you with deep gratitude.
If not, I still thank you for reading and giving me your time.
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