Appeals
19 February 2024
“Mr. Hossam, I got your name from a friend; he told me you can help. We are a family of 11 people, with children and a sick father. We are at Tal Al Sultan in Rafah without shelter, please help us get a tent!”
“Mr. Hossam, I got your name from a friend; he told me you can help. I have been displaced for the fifth time, Jabalia to Gaza, to Burij to Khan Younis, to Rafah. I can’t feed my children, can’t feed my family, please help us with a food parcel or anything, please!”
“I got your name from a friend; he told me you can help. I am a widow living with my disabled father. We are in Rafah, we’ve got nothing, please help us! I urgently need a wheelchair for my father, I can’t move him alone!”
“I got your name from a friend; he told me you can help. We are several families living inside a store 6×3 meters: 37 people, old, children, women, men. We have nothing, we need some clothes for the children, some milk for the babies, please help!”
“I got your name from a friend; he told me you can help. I can’t find any blood pressure medicine. They told us you can get it for us….”
I receive at least 20 similar calls per day. People are desperate. I work for an NGO, we distribute food parcels, some tents, some plastic sheets to make tents, but our capacity is very limited and the demand, the need is so huge. Together, all of the UN agencies and international and national organizations are unable to meet more than 5% of the people’s needs. I really want to help, but who am I? What can I do for all those needy people, while I am also becoming one of them?
I have good connections with many organizations, and I share these demands with others hoping that they will help. But I know that hundreds of thousands of people are left without any help. I know this because I see it every day in the streets, in the tents, in people’s eyes, in the miserable appearances of men and women in the streets, in the sad faces of the children who are not dressed enough for this cold, in the children who walk without shoes, in the huge lines standing in front of bakeries hoping to get some cheap bread, in the thousands of street sellers who are trying to make some income from their few poor, simple goods, in the disputes among people over anything.
People are getting frustrated, angry, nervous, out of control, and who can blame them after all that they have witnessed and have lived through during the last 4 months of killing, destruction, torture, loss of homes and businesses, loss of loved ones, of genocide?
Who can really blame them? Can you?