Help Save Amal’s Beautiful Family

This is the story of Amal. A Gaza mother, struggling to simply exist in a Genocide. A mother just fighting for her children’ survival day after day.

Amal Abu Shanab is originally from Gaza City, where together with her husband Amer (also known as Muhammad) and their 4 children, Fahd (11), Zain (9), Hamoud (7) and Razan (4) lived a simple life working in a small family shop.

At the time of the Israeli attacks in October 2023, Amal was pregnant which was a terrifying prospect for the mother to-be. In February 2024 Amal and her family got besieged in Gaza City together with her brother Muhammad and his young family (they also had a baby girl named Massa). They all left Gaza City in March and arrived in Khan Younis and then got displaced again and came to Deir Al Balah. On the 22th of April 2024 Amal traveled to Rafah to give birth to her baby Seela and returned one day later back to Deir Al Balah. As with almost every pregnancy in Gaza since the occupation began their genocidal campaign, Amal’s was a challenge, and a few days after being born, it was clear that Seela was underweight. They went to Al Aqsa shortly after birth where she stayed for 2 months to help with the malnutrition that was setting in. Seela recovered but the whole experience of giving birth in these traumatic conditions, and seeing her infant struggling, not to mention seeing her other children endure unimaginable hardships, traumatized Amal.

Currently Amal and her family as well as her brother and his young family, live close by, in Al Mawasi camp, in tents close to sewage. The bouts of infectious diseases, the malnourishment, the winter with the rain and cold, all of this is making their existence a daily fight for survival.

The children did not get to go to school or kindergarten, they live in completely unsanitary conditions and baby Seela did not even have winter clothes until recently. Going days without basic caloric intake is a regular across Gaza. Surviving on warm kitchen, they often found themselves without any food for the whole day.

With amazing help from incredibly selfless people, we managed to create a campaign to collect funds for her family, and we had some invaluable support from some kindhearted promoters which did an incredible job increasing donations to the point Amal was able to secure a gas stove, a donated tent, the basic kitchen items, some matrasses and blankets and essential food items like flour and formula. Often Amal said in our exchanges that her family did not eat meat in a very long time, and with the help of these incredible donors, we got one day the message that the children ate meat. It’s a surreal experience to feel joy for something we don’t’ even register as a “want”, for those of us outside of Gaza.

Amal and her family need our help. We need a group of steady donors to provide Amal the much-needed blanket of psychological safety that she will be able to have enough money to buy milk and pampers and flour and fresh fruit and vegetables, when they run out of. All the funds collected here will go towards ensuring they survive another day in Gaza.

For any questions about the campaign, you can reach out to me, or Andreea Hara, as we both support Amal in these hard times.

The lack of access to food, becomes a sentence to death.

YOUR donations are a real lifeline.

Thank you, on behalf of Amal, Amer, Fahd, Zain, Hamoud, Razan and baby Sila.

Update-

Hello,

We have decided to add Amals brother and his family to benefit from this campaign.

Father, Muammar (39 years old)

Mother, Ola (27 years old)

Abdullah 13/8/2014 (10 years old)

Ahmed 18/6/2016 (8 years old)

Islam 12/3/2020 (4 years old)

Massa 19/1/2024 (11 months old)

Amal’s brother and his family live in a tent next to Amal and her family. Their family currently does not have a campaign and they are suffering horribly. Their children deserve the basic necessities to live! All of their children are suffering horribly from severe poverty and hunger.

Sweet little Massa suffers from severe malnutrition. She is 11 months old and without any signs of teeth due to the severe malnutrition and lack of money, milk and food. They rarely have access to diapers because of the very high prices.

Amal’s family have been helping them in every way possible by giving them food, milk, clothes, diapers and everything they are able to purchase and share but this means that they are running through supplies very quickly.

We hope in adding her brothers family to this campaign we can help them more efficiently and effectively with donors being aware of the help Amal and her family do for her brother. The donations will be sent from my account to Amal and then she will give her brother’s family half of every transfer.

Please consider donating and supporting Amal’s family and her brothers family. We greatly appreciate all efforts to help. Thank you for taking the time to read their story. If you have any questions or concerns please contact me through email or Instagram!

My Instagram: @uhmmkayla_

Amal’s family Instagram: @razan_mohmaed.123

PS: This is an update to the original story that ran on the GoFundMe page. This is to correct an important element of Amal’s story, which firstly stated she gave birth to twins and one of them died of malnutrition. The sad truth is that the pressure on Amal to have her story as visible as possible, led her to make this up. This here does not excuse or justify the horrible lie. However, we can empathize with a desperate mother who made a terrible error of judgement in a place none of us ever found ourselves. Amal is a real mother with real children surviving Gaza. That should have been enough. I hope the world can see further than this lie, and we respect anyone who cannot move past this. But Amal’s lie should not cost her children’s safety. A heartfelt thank you!