Help my children survive in Gaza

My name is Wafaa. I am a mother in Gaza, and I am writing this with my phone at 3% battery, sitting on the floor beside my children while the sky shakes above us.

Last night my little girl pressed her face into my shoulder and said, "Mama, my stomach hurts." I checked her for fever. I looked for a wound. There was nothing to find. The pain was hunger. There was no food left to give her. I held her and I cried in the dark so she would not see my face.

That is what this war has done to us. My children no longer ask for toys. They ask for bread. They ask if the bombing will stop before morning. They wake up screaming and hide in corners of a room that has no windows left in it.

I have three children who urgently need medication and medical care. The hospitals near us are destroyed or so overwhelmed that a child with an infection waits behind a hundred people with shrapnel wounds. Medicine that used to cost almost nothing is now impossible to find at any price.

My brother was hit during the war and lost his hand. He was the one who used to carry water for all of us. Now he needs treatment and a prosthetic limb just to live with dignity again — around $50,000 that our family will never have on its own.

Food is scarce. Clean water is rationed by the litre. We boil what we can find. We eat once a day, and on the worst days the children eat and the adults do not.

We are trying to evacuate 19 adults and 9 children from Gaza before it is too late. The crossing costs are brutal: about $12,500 for each man, $8,500 for each woman, $3,000 for each child. Every day we wait, another name on that list may not need a ticket anymore.

I am not asking for comfort. I am asking for survival. $20 is flour, rice and clean water for my children this week. $50 is the medication one of them needs and cannot get. $100 is a step closer to carrying a child across the border to safety. $250 helps move one more child out of the range of the bombs.

If you cannot give, please share. A share costs you nothing and it is how strangers found us in the first place. Someone reading this because of you may be the reason my children see next month.

I do not know how to end a message like this except with the truth: my children are alive right now. While you read this, they are breathing, and they are hungry, and they are scared. Please do not scroll past them.

From the bottom of our hearts — thank you for standing with us when hope feels so far away. 🤍🇵🇸