I Keep Forgetting About the Ceasefire in Gaza
The suffering continues.
Our displaced friends in Gaza know famine, genocide, and trauma intimately. Among the many daily battles the occupation forces them to fight for survival is the looming specter of winter.
Material support has dropped by 90% since last fall. This is not hyperbolic; the statistics across every campaign show the same stark truth.
Many of our friends and comrades who have been giving are suffering financially right now—ICE raids, SNAP freezes, the ongoing government shutdown, job cuts, etc.—but that’s not the only factor.
Call it distraction, empathy fatigue, media bias, whatever you like: resourced folks are largely not showing up for the Global South. This means that despite a slight increase of goods in the market and many necessities being somewhat available now, our friends in Palestine are still living in forced famine.
This is why I keep forgetting about the ceasefire in Gaza: the families I speak to are still experiencing a compounding of suffering.
Tents are worn dangerously thin after 2 years of constant use and repair supplies are costly. Mobile homes, waterproof tents and tarps, and tent supports have not been entering Gaza.
Of course, free aid is scarcely being distributed. Because the occupation still controls border crossings, essential items like fuel, heavy machinery, medical supplies, and malnutrition-specific supplies have entered in only limited quantities, if at all.
This waiting period is both causing and exacerbating crises:
Kids like Asmaa’s children Hussein and Eileen and adults like her husband, who all need special medical care, are in limbo waiting for necessary medications, specialists, or tools to be allowed in.
Patients like Nara and Alaa who urgently require medical treatment outside Gaza and must evacuate with their families are in another limbo waiting for a host country to coordinate with the WHO and the occupation.
Large families like Seraj’s are forced to triage their basic needs and buy the bare minimum for survival so all 13 family members have a chance to live.
Birthing parents like Asmaa Osama are extremely malnourished, unable to breastfeed, and are offered hospital beds with no mattresses because of extreme shortages across the shattered medical system.
Parents of babies, like Wesam and Alaa and Amani, must find ways to keep their infants warm and fed in harsh weather without proper walls and roofs. Keeping them healthy is another challenge—Wesam’s little 4-month-old Ayla is incredibly sick right now.
Everyone needs funds for food, and everyone needs funds for blankets and warm clothes. Especially Wesal, whose family receives only 1-2 small donations a month (If you donate, please leave the note “Wesal”).
So, maybe the bombs and bullets have stopped (they haven’t, really) and maybe more trucks are entering (when the occupation doesn’t go back to their state of collective punishment and food weaponization).
None of this erases the previous, present, and future suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. This winter promises to be harsh and relentless, everything still comes at too high a price, and despite this, support continues to wane.
Please know that if you are unable to financially support anyone right now, you can still make a significant difference. Sharing our friends’ stories and asking folks to support them can be even more impactful than simply and quietly donating. Word of mouth goes a long way for our friends enduring in Gaza.
We’ve only got each other. We must take care of one another.
Palestinian Poetry
“In Gaza a Mother Never Sleeps” by Palestinian writer, poet, and social worker Ne’ma Hasan, displaced in Gaza
She listens to the dark, searches its edges, sorts out sounds– sound
by sound– to select a suitable story to read her kids to sleep.
When they sleep, she stands up to shield them from death.
A mother in Gaza does not cry. She folds up
fear, rage, and prayers in her lungs, and waits
for the hum of warplanes to fade, then exhales.
A mother in Gaza is not like other mothers. She bakes bread
with her own eyes’ salt. She feeds her children to the homeland.