Support Mahmoud's Journey to a Safer Life

Hello, my name is Yasmin Samara, and I am from the US. I am creating a GoFundMe for a friend and his family in Gaza. The funds will be used to travel and live a normal life for my friends, as we all are doing. This is important to me because their lives are at risk, and it is important to me that they make it out of this alive. The funds raised in this GoFundMe will help the family members of Mahmoud; his father is Wa'el, his mother is Sabah, his brother Ahmad and his kids (Sama and Majd), his sister Sabrine (her kids are Ouda and Bar'a), and his sister Alaa.

I am Mahmoud from Gaza, a university graduate. I had no job opportunities in Gaza, so I decided to search for my future and achieve my dreams and ambitions by traveling outside of Gaza. I packed my luggage and got myself ready to start.

But the wind comes with what the ships do not want.

And on the day I was scheduled to travel, the damn war came and changed all of my plans.

My family has suffered unimaginable difficulties.

I forced my family to leave their house and flee from it under the pressure of heavy and continuous bombardment, so I became displaced and uprooted from everywhere and everything we knew before, and now we live in a tent in a camp for displaced people in the south of the Gaza Strip.

The bombing forced us to flee several times. The harsh winter conditions worsened the situation. The environment we live in is terrible. We moved to live in a tent lacking the minimum life elements. We also suffer from the extreme cold at night and the high heat in the day, in addition to the presence of insects and reptiles that we cannot sleep in fear of.

Our lives have turned upside down, where every day brings new challenges and obstacles, so our concern has become to secure access to drinkable water and carry it from long distances, as well as searching for firewood and collecting it to set fire to cook food because of the lack of gas. The minimum availability of it is set at an unimaginable price.

I lost many close friends. The humanitarian situation is deteriorating rapidly, I need your help, world, to survive and bear the high costs of travel

Our four-story house was completely destroyed during the war and settled with the ground.

The house that my father worked tirelessly all his life building and all the hard work of building our life is gone in just seconds. That house that carries all of our memories and laughs in every corner. The beautiful warm house that we now have in the corner of a story in our memories.

So will our house and our lives return to how it was before October 7?

I even asked my father, are you able to rebuild our destroyed house?

He said to me “We have grown up, my son, you are the ones who can build this house and reunite us again.”

Also, the money that was intended for travel was disbursed to provide food and nutrition, which became at unimaginable prices as a result of not allowing humanitarian aid to enter the sector.

Dear friends, I wish and pray that you help and support In rebuilding the family house to bring me together with my family again, and save travel expenses to achieve my dream and ambition and begin my career.

And I hope that you will stand by me and my family to contribute together in rebuilding the house. We hope that we will not die before rebuilding this house because life in Gaza has become extremely difficult.

We are at great risk with being inside Gaza at the present time. I hope you can help me travel and save my family’s life.

Your brother and friend Mahmoud.