Khitam and Kamal are loving grandparents, displaced to Southern California from Gaza City, Palestine. The couple are friends that I cherish. Khitam and Kamal reside in a 400-square-foot studio apartment, laboring tirelessly to meet each month’s $1500 rent, while saving every spare penny to send to their daughter, Maryam, and her 4 children (Sara, Meena, Abdulrahman, and Sidra), who are hunger and malnutrition-stricken, under siege in Gaza City. The family has seen, survived, and endured horrors both material and heart-sickening: the destruction of their beautiful home that Kamal spent 40 years building for them, the forever loss of generations' worth of photographs, the murder of scores of family members, and the starvation of their grandchildren.

Watching death chase the heels of their siblings, nieces and nephews, and children through starvation, bombing, bulldozing of tents, and murder at sites drawing the desperate with lures of food, asks the harrowing of these elders: cleaning, gaining day labor, selling food, forgoing even medical needs, in the hopes that any money they can send might buy one more day of life for their loved ones. They work, save, and weigh the terrible conflict that each coin towards their rent is one that cannot help Maryam, Meena, Sara, Sidra, and Abdulrahman.

This GoFundMe is to gather a few months’ rent for Kamal and Khitam, so that this choice between their lives and their children's lives is not a calculus these grandparents must endure while they wait for the global powers to honor the humanity of their family. It is said that there are two kinds of “cannot.” The first is where one has the will, but not the means. The other describes having the means, but not the will. I ask that anyone with any means, aid Khitam and Kamal in overcoming the ‘cannot’ of providing for their children with one act of giving. They have not asked for help in this heart-crushing circumstance. Please do not repost this request on any social media for their privacy and dignity.

But, please do share this with anyone you know who might respond to an opportunity for concrete, empathetic witness and care, according to whatever code of intentionality drives us. This is a plea to act for the inherent dignity and worth of people, the living, dead, and surviving, if you believe that is true. Thank you for holding this part of this family’s story with care.