Help Adel and His Remaining Family

My name is Adel Al-Tawil, I am a 29-year-old artist from Gaza. I have a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and I worked as a children’s art trainer/teacher. My life in Gaza was filled with life, energy, and dreams that I strived to achieve every day, not only for my own personal growth, but to support my family, whose future and stability lay in my ability to reach these goals. However, everything stopped when our life took an unexpected turn on October 7, 2023. It was then that life took on a new, darker shape, the end of which remains uncertain to this day. During the genocide, we experienced indescribable and unimaginable days, marked by hunger, fear, financial scarcity, death and murder, and the deterioration of all aspects of our lives. No matter how much I talk about those months and days, they remain inexplicable except for those who experienced them firsthand.

And then came that unforgettable day, on January 24, 2024, at 8:20 PM. It was that Wednesday when our house was bombed with six missiles by the Israeli Occupation Army, the most backward and ghoulish army in the world. During the attack, 12 members of my family were martyred together, with my brother, Khaled, and I the sole survivors of this indiscriminate attack, along with our niece, Nour, and her mother, Rehab. My father, my mother, my brothers Arafat and Osama, and my dear sisters Mona, Islam, Saja, and Doha, as well as my brother’s wife and her three children—Saleh (4 years), Sham (3 years), and Sila (9 months) were all martyred with impunity, despite not posing any threat to this bloodthirsty, inhumane, and criminal army. With those bombs, the IOF destroyed all our dreams, our only home, our city, and everything we worked for. Now, without family, home, or the homeland, I am alone. I can’t begin to think about where I should go next.

After months of enduring the ongoing carnage of Israel’s genocide on Gaza, I finally managed to leave for Egypt, leaving my only surviving brother in Gaza, and the memory of my family and our life together behind, towards the unknown. I became a wandering body, with my thoughts, heart, and mind still in my homeland, at the graves where my martyred family lays.

Despite everything that I endured, my belief in God and my unrelenting wish to begin anew, with the eyes of my mother, the spirit of my father, and all those I have loved and lost with me in every moment here on after. My wish now is to find safety and security, whatever shape it may take for me and my brother, with new beginnings. I want to create those beginnings, to settle down, to get married, and to carry on my family’s name and their legacy, one that was robbed from us. I want to continue my journey as an artist, to create, express, and speak about my homeland through my practice, while also supporting my remaining family. This campaign is the first step towards making that a reality. Every donation, no matter how small or great, will help bring me and my brother closer to a possible future and a new start.