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<div>In February 2024, after months of hesitation, we launched this campaign with one goal: to help my family escape Gaza through Rafah Crossing.
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<div>Like thousands of Palestinian families, we found ourselves in the impossible position of having to raise enormous sums simply to leave. Before we could collect enough, Rafah Crossing closed in May 2024. Evacuation became impossible, and the campaign transformed overnight. It was no longer about leaving Gaza—it became about surviving inside it.
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<div>That same month, my family was forced to flee from Rafah to Khan Younis. Displacement became our daily reality. They moved from one place to another as military operations expanded, living in tents that offered no protection from winter rain or summer heat. Food became scarce. Clean water almost disappeared. Hospitals collapsed. Finding medicine for my father, who lives with a pacemaker and later suffered a stroke, became an exhausting search through what remained of Gaza's health system and informal markets where prices had become unimaginable.
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<div>In January 2025, our family home in Rafah was demolished. A few months later, famine spread across Gaza, turning the search for bread and drinking water into the centre of daily life. In June 2025, our family lost my brother Raji, who was killed in an Israeli drone strike. Since then, survival has meant continuous displacement, grief, hunger, and impossible choices. Part of this journey was documented by <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/06/08/magazine/gaza-family.html?unlocked_article_code=1.olA.3R-u.FV9rCo83IwCt&amp;smid=nytcore-ios-share" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">The New York Times Magazine</a>, which investigated the extraordinary financial cost families have been forced to bear simply to stay alive.
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<div><strong>NOW</strong>
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<div>Today, my family lives in a single rented room, with a small bathroom beside it. Outside that room, sheets of fabric and plastic have been stretched together to create enough space for everyone. It is not our home. Our home in Rafah was destroyed. This small room is simply the last shelter we have been able to secure after months of displacement.
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<div>The war may no longer dominate international headlines, but its consequences shape every hour of our lives. Every day is still spent searching for food, clean water, medicine, electricity, and shelter. My father continues to live with a pacemaker and is now recovering from a cerebrovascular accident (stroke), requiring medication, monitoring, and rehabilitation that simply do not exist in Gaza.
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<div>After months of medical assessments, humanitarian referrals, and coordination between hospitals and international organizations, my father has finally been approved for medical evacuation through the World Health Organization's Emergency Medical Team and the European Emergency Response Coordination Centre (ERCC). For our family, this approval represents something we have not felt in a very long time: a real possibility that he might receive the treatment needed to save his life.
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<div>I will attach the official ERCC referral letter to this campaign because I want everyone supporting us to know that this is not a distant hope—it is a documented humanitarian process that is now underway.
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<div>But approval alone does not end our struggle.
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<div>While we wait for evacuation, my family must still survive every day inside Gaza. They continue living in a single rented room, paying rent they can no longer afford. Food, medicine, transportation, electricity, and even drinking water have become extraordinary expenses. Over more than two years, I exhausted my savings, borrowed from friends, and transferred everything I could to keep my family alive. By the end of 2025, those efforts had already left me carrying more than $150,000 in debt. The transfers have not stopped since, because neither has the need.
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<div>I am not asking anyone to repay those debts. They are mine to carry.
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<div>I am asking for help with what my family needs today: to remain alive, sheltered, and together until this medical evacuation finally becomes reality.
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<div><strong>SO</strong>
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<div>More than two years have passed since this campaign began.
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<div>It started as an appeal to help my family leave Gaza. When that became impossible, it became a campaign to help them survive. Today, it has become both.
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<div>The people who supported us over these past two years did far more than contribute to a fundraiser. They became part of our family's ability to endure. Every donation became food when shelves were empty, medicine when pharmacies had none, rent when displacement left us without shelter, and another day of life when hope felt increasingly fragile.
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<div>Today, we find ourselves at another turning point.
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<div>For the first time in a long time, there is a real humanitarian pathway for my father's medical evacuation. But until that journey becomes reality, my family still has to survive each day inside Gaza. They still need shelter. They still need food, clean water, medicine, and the means to remain together.
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<div>I am not asking you to erase the losses of the past two years. No campaign can rebuild what we have lost, bring back my brother Raji, or restore our destroyed home.
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<div>I am asking something much simpler.
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<div>Help us protect the people who are still here.
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<div>Help us keep my family alive long enough to reach safety.
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<div>If you have already supported us, thank you for carrying us this far. If you are reading our story for the first time, I invite you to become part of it.
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<div>Whether by contributing, sharing this campaign, or introducing it to someone who may be able to help, every act of solidarity expands the circle that has kept my family alive until today.
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<div>We have spent more than two years trying to survive.
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<div>We have not given up.
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<div>I hope you will continue this journey with us until survival is no longer the only thing we are fighting for.
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Sarah Konig

Agnieszka Cendrowska

Mia Carmel

Anonymous

Jessie Nesbit

Maura Stephens

Ayesha Bhatti

Rachel Sanders

Linda Smith

Fabienne Vailes

Kaitlyn Haines

Sierra Allen

Natalia Battistini

Gwen Nuin

Ratna Shah

Lifeline Aid for AbuShamala’s Family in Gaza

Lifeline Aid for AbuShamala’s Family in Gaza

Still £1,748 to go. Help us build momentum.