With a broken heart and trembling hands, I am writing to you today, not just to ask for help, but to fight for our survival.
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Since the fighting began on 7 October 2023, and on 8 October 2023 our house vanished under the rubble in a single second. We spread a torn tent and a cold pavement for shelter. The toys of our childhood and the family photos melted in the flames, and the smell of smoke stays alive as proof of what we have lost.
Is it fair that the memory of a whole family turns into ashes because the sky decided to rain bombs instead of clouds?
My father, the teacher Ayman, passed away at the beginning of 2023, and grief did not give us much time before our mother's illness, which she had been battling for eight years — brain cancer — grew more severe. The illness grew more severe in 2023: recurring comas, head-splitting headaches, sudden seizures, and violent tremors, sharp suffocating attacks, because the fibrosis in her lungs was stealing her breath. She stayed months in Gaza on a cold bed with worn-out oxygen machines. We exchanged desperate looks, begging her to stay with us. After bitter efforts with the Red Crescent and the Ministry of Health, we finally moved her to Egypt. There, after a long struggle, fate closed its curtain on 09 June 2025, and our mother Nima left us, leaving an emptiness that nothing can fill, and so we became without a mother and without a father.
How can one heart bear the farewell of a father, then the farewell of a mother, before it even takes a breath between them?
They left behind Tasneem (28), Abdullah (25), Ahmad (22), me, Ibrahim (19), and the twins Mohammad and Yahya (14). Abdullah is fighting a tumor in his brain, frequent seizures, severe pancreatic dysfunction, and irregular heartbeats; his medicines are either missing or at fantastic prices. Mohammad suffers from Behcet syndrome; he needs immune-suppressing pills, the pill price is fifteen dollars, and he takes two a day. If they stop, his eyes turn into open blood. I choke every month because even the expired asthma inhaler costs one hundred dollars and I cannot afford it.
Doesn’t a patient in pain have the right to find medicine as others find water and air?
Since my father left, the only salary was cut, and my mother, may God rest her, had a small pension we used to send to her to fight pain and stay a light in our life. But when she closed her eyes, the last line of income was gone. No job, no pension, nothing. The tiring life made us old; what kind of life is this? We now stand in charity queues behind hungry kids, begging for a plate of rice covered with dust. A kilo of flour is sold for one hundred dollars, a luxury our hands cannot reach. Everything vanished in a moment; they went, and so did everything they built and did for us because of the war. I will miss you, father and mother, with nothing left.
Despite the ruin, we carry torn books and big dreams. I study software engineering, Ahmad business administration, Abdullah civil engineering, but the university fees are a sword over our necks. We have no coin to pay the fees or even buy a new pen, and the twins are banned from school for the same reasons. No regular electricity, no reliable internet, no safe desks.
A few months ago, I applied to the University of Glasgow for the Dima Alhaj Scholarship for Palestinians. I was awarded a study place, but sadly I did not win the scholarship. The results were announced at the end of July, and I was rejected. It is deeply unfair that the university has given over 40 scholarships to Ukrainian students, yet only one seat to students from Palestine. Your donation through this campaign will allow me to pay my tuition fees to the University of Glasgow and be safely evacuated there.
How can we keep our right to education when the pen is more expensive than safety?
Every night in Gaza turns into a living nightmare that swallows childhood. Nobody here sleeps like children of the world; there is no bedtime story, no mother’s kiss, no father’s hand saying do not fear, I am here. We only have the sounds of shelling, the darkness of the tent, and small hearts that cannot bear all this horror.
My little twin brothers around me do not ask when will we go to the park; they ask me, If we die, will we go to mom, will we meet her, will she wait for us in heaven? Mohammad and Yahya, the twins, sleep holding my hand as if I am their last lifeline. One of them asked me one night, with tears choking him, If we die, tell mom that we tried to stay. We count rockets instead of stars and know the sound of planes more than the sound of laughter.
Their dreams became screams, their games fear, their eyes look for an embrace that disappeared with the shelling, with the war, with all that we lost. We sleep to the sound of a martyr, we wake to the echo of a funeral. We don’t dream anymore; dreaming became a luxury, and sleep a privilege the children of Gaza do not have.
My little twin brothers, still in the bloom of childhood, ask me what a massacre means and how many martyrs there are. Then they ask, 'Is it our turn?
What kind of childhood is this? What mind can bear seeing a child tie a scarf around his brother to protect him from flying glass? What conscience accepts that a child knows the word body parts before he knows the shape of a rainbow?
How long will children of Gaza be deprived of sleep, play, laughter, safety? When will the night be a warm bed and not a dark cellar? When will we all have the simple right to live without fear of not finishing this day?
How long will the right to sleep be delayed until further notice; how long will we count rockets instead of stars?
Your donation is not a random click on a screen; it is a real breath of life in the middle of collective choking. The money that will be gathered will not buy us luxury, but the minimum of survival.
It will help buy Abdullah medicines that reduce the effects of the brain tumor and fight seizures and loss of awareness. These medicines are very expensive; some pills reach dozens of dollars each, and even when they are found, they are rare and cut off for many days.
It will help me get asthma inhalers that I cannot breathe without; the price of one can is one hundred dollars, and often we find it expired or not found at all.
And it will give Mohammad the immune pills that keep Behçet's disease under control; when they stop, his eyes turn into painful bleeding, and every day of delay brings the risk of losing him closer.
Your donation means I, Ahmad, and Abdullah can continue our university study instead of being pushed one by one out of the seats of knowledge we fight to keep.
It means that Tasneem can complete her dream to become a teacher and return to the warmth of the pen after she lost everything.
And it also means Mohammad and Yahya can go back to school instead of spending childhood in bread lines and fear of explosions.
Your donation simply is what will help us stand here in this crazy high cost of living so we can later prepare our papers and leave this hell safely toward a life with medicine, water, education, and a small house we rebuild again in a world where we find medicine, water, and air without sirens.
We will not forget what our parents did for us, and we will rebuild what the occupation destroyed, if only someone first stretches a hand.
Are you waiting to see us close our eyes, not to sleep, but to die?
Are you waiting for our story to change from a call to an obituary?
How long will we keep screaming in the dark without anyone hearing?
Be for us as our mother was and as our father was.
Be the warmth we lost, the support we need to rise from the rubble and start again.
Your donation today might be the difference between an ending and a beginning.
Will you be the hand that saves us from the ruins and places the first brick in a new house that says on its walls, here life returns?
Our message to the world:
We are makers of peace, born between guns. We dream only of dignity that looks like your simplest rights: a bed without fear, medicine without siege, a pen without chains.
What sin made Gaza a graveyard of dreams instead of being their cradle?
If our words reach your hearts, light a candle in our tent, even a small one. The light begins with a spark, and gratitude writes your name in the pages of nobility forever.
Please note that 15% will be deducted from the amount as transfer fees.
