Stories from my friends still trying to survive.
It begins with a panicked message on Bluesky in October 2024. Someone is messaging me with a link to a fundraiser and stilted English that reads as though it came from a bad translation app. The picture on her GoFundMe shows a young woman with a pale face and shocking green eyes.
It’s been seven months since the borders of Gaza were sealed. She says she is in Zeitoun, a pocket of north Gaza under siege. I respond in colloquial Arabic, to see if this person can even speak the language, to see if she is real. I ask her for a WhatsApp number. She gives me one. It starts with +972.
She is real. Her name is Hayat. She, along with her husband and children, did not flee south as the siege on north Gaza tightened. Where to go? she says.
Hayat is pregnant. Eventually she will give birth—by c-section, without anesthesia—to a little girl with blue-green eyes as brilliant as her own. She names her Fatima. Now, I have a namesake in Gaza.
I meet Mohamed next. A farmer and a teacher, he has lost his sheep and rabbits, but even living in al-Mawasi refugee camp, he persists in growing plants and crops in a little garden by his shelter so there may be something fresh to eat amid the siege. Al-Mawasi, a cruelly named “safe zone,” has witnessed regular attacks and bombardments since Mohamed arrived there in March 2024.
This same siege today, almost three months since all aid to Gaza has been cut off, has driven people to famine. The cost of flour, if you can find it, careens wildly, swinging from an already farcical $100 USD to an impossible $700 USD. The bread bakeries have shut down. The World Central Kitchen says its warehouses are bare. Children have been dying of malnutrition and under bombs all at once, like fish in an increasingly shrinking barrel. To quote a DC pundit, “The war in Gaza is not really that different than other wars.” A beat. “Well, except I guess they can’t run away.”
My keeping a bunny as a pet amuses Mohamed. One day, he shares a story about missing his animals, and a farmer in Texas donates $500 to his fundraising campaign. Mohamed is saving every penny for his eventual evacuation from Gaza, now a distant hope. Meanwhile, the cost to survive continues its inhumane inflationary spiral. Funds meant for escape are now hoarded for food, any food, which is becoming harder and harder to find.
After Hayat and Mohamed, I meet Obada. Obada is a lawyer with three children. He considers his youngest, Zain, a gift from God, as his other two children required medical intervention to exist. Zain did not. On Eid, Obada shares a photo of Zain in his little white thobe, a dignified and serious garment for adults that is adorable on a baby.
The calls for help swirl thick and fast—other families realize they can build lifelines beyond the walls of Gaza, that someone, anyone, is willing to hear out their agony. There are Naser and Amal, with their children Rolan and Omar. Naser currently lies in one of Gaza’s last functioning hospitals with a breathing obstruction, and needs surgery. I try to help them a little. Rolan sends me a thank you photo: a young girl of seven, sitting on a pile of rubble against a blue sky, holding a sign that reads, “My love for you (heart) Fatima Ayub.”
Before Israel sealed the Rafah crossing with Egypt in March 2024, it cost $5000 USD per adult, and $2500 USD per child, to organize an evacuation from Gaza. Those figures, as extortionate as they were, are meaningless now. No one can leave, and if they do, it will be as part of the deliberate depopulation of the strip. Yet, as my friends in Gaza keep telling me, nothing is left. Virtually no school, clinic, hospital, or mosque in Gaza has been left standing. Gaza has been bombed more heavily than London, Dresden, and Hamburg in World War II, combined. Children keep arriving in the few remaining hospitals with bullets in their heads.
I meet multiple Ahmads. There is Original Ahmad, who braved the migration boat passage under Israeli gunfire to escape Gaza to Europe—but is distraught because his mother and the rest of his family are still in the north. There’s Child Ahmad, who returned to Gaza to marry his lifelong sweetheart Samar, and was trapped when the war came. There’s Other Ahmed, whose siblings are all frantically trying to survive in a tent. Then, comes Another Ahmad, who shares a photo of himself in the rain, barefoot with already too-thin legs.
There is Suad, who is only 24, and mother to a little boy, Omar. She’s taken to calling me mom, having lost her own mother before the war. I have no maternal experience, but try to hear her story. Among the most common injuries in Gaza unrelated to war wounds are burns—made worse by so many people cooking on unsafe, open fires. She shows me a bad burn that needs medical treatment. Her little boy has broken his leg, an ordinary childhood tragedy compounded infinitely by the horror.
I meet Malak and Maali, who are sisters. Maali is disabled and needs a new wheelchair and special care. Malak labors hard on an unwelcome internet and on an unforgiving planet to help her sister retain her life and dignity.
Then comes Majd, 17, only just a child himself. Still, he shoulders the responsibility of trying to help his sisters and mother survive. He feels he has no choice.
Moataz is a shy and kind young man whose beloved father is ailing from kidney disease. Moataz doesn’t understand online fundraising, doesn’t understand social media, doesn’t understand this bizarre dystopia where he talks to a woman on the other side of the planet to try and outmaneuver a siege of biblical proportions.
Rumors circulate in the aftermath of hostage Edan Alexander’s release that food aid will be permitted to enter Gaza. So far, these are only rumors. The siege grinds on. The ground invasion begins in earnest. An Israeli MK tells the world, “Last night, almost 100 Gazans were killed. And the question you asked me just now had nothing to do with Gaza. Do you know why? Because it doesn’t interest anyone. Everyone has gotten used to [the fact] that [we can] kill 100 Gazans in one night during a war and nobody cares in the world.”
Does anyone care? Does caring matter?
Hayat, too, has burned herself. She tells me a pack of diapers for baby Fatima costs $70.
Still, no aid comes.
Obada sends me photos of his dear friend, killed just last night with his wife and baby daughter. “My heart hurts, Fatima,” he tells me. “With his baby in his arms. He was only married a year.”
Still, no aid comes.
A friend asks me if I can help Hanadi, a still-young woman with eight children. I give what I can.
Still, no aid comes.
Even good news comes tainted. Naser is out of the hospital, but now, his neighborhood in Khan Younis is under evacuation orders following the latest assault. He decides not to evacuate. “I’m tired,” he tells me. “Rolan came to me crying asking why we are staying when everyone else is fleeing. It cut my heart.”
Child Ahmad, meanwhile, is fleeing, also pushed into al-Mawasi. He says he will not be online so much. When I do not hear from him for a day, I worry. I think of the al-Hol concentration camp for some 55,000 wives and children of ISIS fighters in Syria.
The US undertakes a farcical “aid delivery attempt,” under the eye of mercenaries who take selfies against a backdrop of starving Palestinians. The effort is about as successful as the floating pier to deliver aid that sank into the sea, a perfect grotesque metaphor, almost as perfect as letting children die while hundreds of thousands of tons of food rots within sight.
Now that the ghastly end game for Gaza has been laid bare, this is what we—the Western world—have done to the Palestinians. When will it end? my friends ask me. How much more can we be expected to take? they ask. Until when? they ask.
It is May 28, 2025. I have no answers for anyone.
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If readers wish to help any of these or other families trying to survive in Gaza, they may contact the author on Signal at fatimaayub.01 or by email at fsayub@gmail.com.
