Help Fatena's Family Rebuild 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 the beauty and resilience of a Palestinian woman that I have the honor of calling a friend, Fatena Hamdan. Like me, she is a woman and a mother, with hopes and dreams for our children. There is no difference between us; we were just born in different places.

Fatena is a 33-year-old married mother to five children, ages 7-21. Before the war started, Fatena’s husband traveled to Egypt for a medical procedure that was supposed to keep him away from his family for less than a week. However, her husband could not return due to the war starting immediately after the events on October 7th, 2023. This left Fatena alone with all of her children in a war zone. All entrances and exits from the Gaza Strip were immediately closed. However, her husband being in Egypt made it so that she could evacuate with her children, as he could register them from the Egyptian side to cross the border. They were 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.

The reality is that in Egypt, Palestinians are refugees, with no permission to work or get steady or safe housing. Her husband and sons are looking for work constantly, but 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 difficult for the family to find stability. When Fatena left Gaza, she left her mother, sister, and countless friends and family and has extreme guilt about it; but she had to leave to survive. The situation is impossible.

Fatena still has dreams of returning to Gaza and has an intense fear that the remainder of her family will not survive. Can you imagine leaving the people you love most behind in a genocide? 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 Fatena can find for her children, there will be school fees (her children have missed two years of school now), undetermined amount at this time.

- After all of that stuff listed above, they still have to repay the $29,000 that they spent crossing the border.

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

Free Palestine.