Help Tolane and her family survive after fleeing Gaza

Hello, my name is Carly Berube and I am a nurse who lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.

I want to tell you a story of Tolane Hamdan and her family. She is a seven-year-old girl who was born in Gaza never left until the bombs started falling. She was in her home when the bombs hit and was injured, but thankfully they survived. I know Tolane’s whole extended family and have watched her grow up. Tolane’s mother is Fatena, who is a 33-year-old married mother to five children, ages 7-21.

Before the genocide started, Tolane’s father traveled to Cairo, Egypt for a medical procedure that was supposed to keep him away from his family for less than a week. However, he could not return due to the bombardment starting immediately after the events on October 7th, 2023. Her father owned a luxury car shop and the family had a beautiful life.

This left Tolane alone with all her mother and siblings in a war zone since her father was in Egypt. All entrances and exits from the Gaza Strip were immediately closed. However, it was a blessing that her father was in Egypt; as he could register them from the Egyptian side to cross the border. Tolane with her mother and brothers crossed over to Egypt in December 2023 and have been struggling to survive as refugees ever since.

He was able to borrow the border crossing money, but they will have to pay it back. For context, it cost each adult $5,000 and each child $3,000 to cross the border from Gaza into Egypt. This means they have to repay $29,000. This is the cost that Egyptian officials bribe Palestinians to escape a genocide, it is unconscionable.

The reality is that in Egypt, Palestinians are refugees, with no permission to work or get steady or safe housing. Her father, mother and brothers are looking for work constantly, and not having work papers makes it really difficult. Predatory landlords and people in power in Egypt are not friends to Palestinians, and it has been very difficult for the family to find stability.

Tolane and her brothers desperately want to go to school but it is costly and right now her family is just trying to eat everyday and pay rent. They have now missed two years of school, soon to be three years. The rest of the extended family are still in Gaza.

Tolane still has dreams of returning to Gaza and seeing her best friends, that she doesn't know of they are still alive. Can you imagine leaving the people you love most behind in a genocide and being a child? The Gaza Strip was not an easy place to live before this genocide started, but despite living in one of the world's most overpopulated pieces of land, where people do not have control over any aspects of their lives, Palestinians made it beautiful there.

For context, Gaza has been under complete siege by land, air, and sea since 2005, and a complete siege means that the occupation controls all of the borders, and the majority of the Palestinians are not granted the ability to leave. In the words of leading scholar and a direct descendant of Holocaust survivors, Norman Finkelstein, "Gaza is the world's largest open-air prison."

How the money will be spent:

- Rent in Cairo for the Palestinians is very high. It is higher for them than the Egyptians that live there. Currently, they pay $800 per month and the whole family sleeps in one big room.

- Even though they get food donations from some local charities, they don't get it every week and reliably, so sometimes they have to spend money on food. They spend around $100 a week for food.

- If there is a school that Tolane can attend, there will be school fees

- After all of that stuff listed above, they still have to repay the $29,000 that they spent crossing the border. It is similar to owing a bounty hunter.

No donation is too small. Thank you for reading her story and standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people.

Free Palestine.