Dear friends please help us keep Ahmad and his family safe!

Ahmad's Message:

Dear all,

My name is Ahmad, and I was born 26 years ago in a neighborhood in Gaza City. It once was a beautiful neighborhood, a place that my wife and I used to call home; but now, this home turned into piles of rubble and dust.

Here Below is a recent update:

l don't know if, after 22 months, we are still able to tell you how things really are here.

We are without money, without food, without strength, without any comfort, and I don't believe that simply telling you this - simply using words - can make you understand how dark and ghostly our nights are, how intense our dizziness is, how our stomachs growl, how hard it is to ask for help knowing that, in the end, it's about money.

We live in a state of mind where gratitude and the feeling of being in debt are mixed: sometimes one prevails, sometimes the other, in an alternation of blessing and despair.

Among the many things we no longer talk about, there is what you see in the photo: a child - my son Anas, my life - sitting on a rocket that, of course, wasn't here 22 months ago.

It is the empty shell of a rocket that fell from the sky, a huge projectile launched by the occupation, meant to kill us but instead wedged itself between destroyed and crumbling houses.

Around this rocket, a gathering point was born, and I get chills writing this because we have learned, on our people's skin, how dangerous gathering points can be.

In the background, you can see a line of people waiting to get water; it's a distribution point for those displaced in the camp.

Here, behind me, in a destroyed house, a man has found a way to set up a bread oven. He deals with fuel and firewood, breathing soot all day long in the August heat, and we bring him our managed to find flour, and my wife prepared the dough.

That rocket has become the bench where we all sit while waiting for our meal to cook.

Anas's short little legs don't reach the ground and they swing, his heels tapping against the metal skin of that projectile. Next to this shell, he looks even smaller. How is it possible that, in this same world, my son's tenderness and the violence of that projectile exist together?

I always hope tenderness will prevail, because that rocket is no longer a rocket, but a bench, and because today, in the air, there is the smell of bread.