Dear Friends and Supporters,

My name is Mahmoud Al Shaer. a Palestinian writer, editor, and cultural worker from the Gaza Strip. After surviving one of the most devastating and cruel years of our lives, my wife Hadil, our daughter Nai, and I have finally reached safety in Bilbao, in northern Spain. This city—warm, gentle, and full of life—has become our first refuge after the long nightmare we endured.

But our journey is not complete.

Our son, Majd, remains in Turkey with my mother, receiving ongoing medical care for his rare liver condition. Every day we wake up with one hope: to reunite our family again, to hold him with the safety and stability we finally managed to reach.

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What We Carry With Us

I worked as an editor, curator, and poet in Gaza—leading 28 Magazine, co-founding Gallery 28, and coordinating cultural programs at Al Ghussein Cultural House. These spaces were the heart of my work, built with years of dedication, community effort, and belief in culture as a form of resilience.

All of it is gone now.

Gallery 28 was destroyed.

Al Ghussein Cultural House was reduced to rubble.

And the life we built was shattered.

From May 2024 until our evacuation, we were displaced more than ten times, moving between tents, temporary shelters, and devastated neighborhoods. We lived without electricity, clean water, or medical access. Our days were consumed by survival—by the simple act of staying alive.

But in October 2025, we finally crossed into a new possibility:

we are safe, for the first time in years.

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Where We Are Now

In Bilbao, we are slowly learning how to live again—

How to wake without explosions.

How to breathe without calculating danger.

How to feel the world with open senses, not fear.

But safety is only partial when your child is far away.

Majd’s absence is the fracture that has not healed yet.

Our goal now is to secure the means to reunite with him in Turkey and bring him safely to us, where he can continue his medical treatment surrounded by his family.

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Why We Still Need Your Support

This campaign, originally created to help us find a path out of Gaza, now serves a different purpose:

To help us stabilize our new life

To support our travel and legal costs for family reunification with Majd

To ensure we can provide safe housing, food, and medical needs for our family during this transition

Your support has brought us from the ruins of Gaza to the safety of Bilbao.

Your continued support will help us complete the journey:

to bring Majd home.

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With Deep Gratitude

To everyone who has stood with us—through donations, messages, shares, or even silent solidarity—please know this: you helped save our lives.

We are alive today because of you.

We are safe because you believed in us.

And we continue to carry hope because you helped keep it alive when everything else was collapsing.

We will keep sharing updates and reflections from our journey—our healing, our writing, our steps toward rebuilding a life that was almost erased.

Thank you, from the depth of our hearts,

Mahmoud AlShaer and Family

Bilbao, Spain