Hello, there – here is the link to my appeal / fundraiser to help two of my friends inside Gaza, who have no salaries and no savings and right now no homes. Their names are Hala and Faiza and they are both women from Gaza. Hala is stranded in Khan Yunis and Faiza is living in a tent in Rafah because her home in Rafah has been destroyed.
Please give to this appeal if you can. Please share this appeal with people you know, your friends, family and colleagues. Please help me raise the funds to support my friends, who will use this money to buy food and personal hygiene items (which are all incredibly expensive now because they are in such short supply, as Israel is permitting minimum levels of aid into Gaza) and also drinking water, because wells and water pumps have been destroyed across Gaza by the Israeli military. It will also allow them to buy phone vouchers to call their extended families displaces across Gaza, and to clarify who amongst them is still alive.
I am not going to elaborate here on the appalling humanitarian situation in Gaza, the direct result of this senseless war by Netanyahu’s government against the Gazan Palestinians. I’m sure most of you have read the news since 7th October last year. Twenty nine thousand Palestinians have died since then inside Gaza, and the government of Israel has not achieved in its military objectives, because, beyond their utter inhumanity, these objectives are not coherent.
More than a hundred Israeli hostages, God help them, remain inside Gaza. Two million Palestinians also remain imprisoned inside Gaza, and everything that rips across the Strip – fear, hunger, disease and hoplessness, remind us if we really need reminding again that military onslaughts do not solve entrenched political conflicts.
In the words of Gazan journalist Motaz Azaiza, “To be clear, this is not a war against Hamas. This is and has always been a war against the Palestinian people.” To that I can only add a reflection by the British reporter and war analyst Patrick Coburn, who has written much about Western leaders dogged support of Netanyahu’s government in the face of mass indiscriminate killings across Gaza. “As western governments and elites become aware that their reputations are being damaged beyond repair by the taint of Gaza, they have produced a series of PR ploys and alibis. The simplest is to call for Netanyahu and the IDF to show restraint, fully aware that their track record indicates that they will do nothing of the sort.”
War demands resistant defiance: we gather, we speak out and light candles and we walk and protest and we stand together including with every Israeli person opposed to this onslaught and people in Gaza, believe me, they need to know we are doing these actions together for them every day. Please do not cease. Be resisters of the best kind, fierce, kind, questioning of power and honest with yourself. That my friends is the most radical resistance there is.
Here again is the link to my Go Fund Me fundraiser appeal https://gofund.me/15315782
Thank you
Blog photo credit: Hosny Salah, Gaza photographer.
