Help Mohammed support his relatives in Gaza

Hello, everyone, and thank you for reading my story. I am Mohammed Shamia, a fourth year student of laboratory medicine. 

i’ve spent all my time  since evacuating thinking of nothing but evacuating my relatives. How does one think of the future whilst trying to secure his family’s mere survival? 

I still can’t think of the future, because the crossing has been closed for almost 4 months now, and conditions in Gaza have grown even more impossible than they were when I was there. Now, I have to think of supporting my relatives so that they don’t need to begin spending their evacuation & resettlement funds.

Your solidarity and support has helped me raise my relatives’ evacuation fees, & for that my gratitude will last a lifetime. My task now is to sustain the following relatives, whose health worsens with every traumatic displacement (the IOF, if you’ve noticed, is forcing people to move their tents far more frequently than before). 

-My parents

-My grandparents.

-My brother Hassan

-My sister Samah, her husband, & their 3 children

Just barely feeding these 10 people costs $600 a week. A package of laundry detergent costs $100, and there are of course other expenses as well, like my mother’s medication for arrhythmia. A flat $3,000 will enable them to barely sustain themselves.

My family will also need:

-To pay living expenses for myself, my cousins Heba, Munther, and Jomana, and Jomana’s husband and 3 children in Cairo. None of us have Egyptian citizenship or permanent residency, and so we cannot work. Fortunately, we are thrifty, and live in a humble neighborhood called Matereya, and so we can collectively get by on $600. 

-Since my university in Gaza has been destroyed, i will likely need to finish my education here in Egypt. Semesterly tuition costs run around ~$3,000 for Palestinian expatriate students.

As you know, the Rafah crossing has been closed two months, and all of the relatives for whom I’ve raised the registration fee remain in Gaza. This is how they live.

We try to support them without dipping into donations allocated for other purposes, but life in Gaza is extremely expensive. A pack of diapers will cost you $100, and accessing critical health services (which babies often require given the deeply unhealthy environment they inhabit) can really hurt your pockets, to say the least. For now, I will add $1,000 to give us a modest cushion and make our goal a clean $70,000.

Again, my family deeply appreciates your solidarity and support.

With love,

Mohammed