Israel is starving Gaza. Here’s how you can help keep people alive.
“People in Gaza are neither dead nor alive, they are walking corpses.”
These are the words of Philippe Lazzarini, the Commissioner-General of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, who posted on X earlier today that more than 100 people, “the vast majority of them children,” have now died of starvation in Gaza. Meanwhile, thousands of aid trucks sit at the border, denied permission to enter, while bombs and bullets continue to rain down on the decimated enclave.
Israel’s brutal military assault on Gaza has horrified the world for more than 21 months now, but this latest phase of the genocide—extermination through mass starvation—is a grim new nadir.
Many of us feel paralyzed by despair, waking to images of emaciated Palestinian children on our phone screens each morning, but there are still things we can do to help.
We can protest. We can boycott. We can strike. We can disrupt business as usual until the machinery that facilitates the continuation of this horror grinds to a halt.
And we can donate to mutual aid organizations that are working on the ground to keep Palestinians in Gaza alive. I want to spotlight one of those organizations today:
The Sameer Project is a donations-based rapid-response initiative, led by Palestinians in the diaspora, working to supply aid to displaced Palestinians in Gaza.
In its first year of fundraising, the Sameer Project raised more than $4.3 million for displaced families in Gaza. With that money, the group was able to provide:
12.6 million liters of fresh drinking water.
Medical care for thousands of patients.
1,299 tents, sheltering 9,093 people.
Food for 627,737 people through community kitchens and aid packages.
2,655 packs of diapers. 1,820 pairs of shoes. 3,000 toys.
500 baby outfits to prevent hypothermia.
1,315 blankets.
2,129 formula packets to feed hungry babies.
Salaries for 53 team members—including nurses, doctors, teachers, cleaners, and project managers—which further supported 53 families on the ground.
First aid, hygiene, breastfeeding, and childcare training for 242 people.
The Sameer Project also built the Refaat Alareer Camp—named after the beloved Palestinian poet, activist, and university professor who was killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike in December 2023—which contains an educational tent, a medical point, facilities for new and expecting mothers, and tent and toilet facilities for 50 families at any given time. The camp also holds music classes, speech/physical therapy sessions, and VR-assisted trauma therapy.
The Sameer Project usually feeds tens of thousands of people each week, but in recent days the situation in Gaza has become so dire that its staff cannot find sufficient amounts of food to keep community kitchens operational. As the group wrote on its instagram page earlier this week:
…now we can only find limited amounts of nutritional packets and some vegetable in the markets. When we do, this supply goes to the sickest patients in hospitals to keep them alive, and we will continue to do this.
We are still able to buy water and we are still able to buy tents and provide medication. But soon this will not matter when people are dropping in the streets.
The Sameer Project has proven to be one of the last lifelines for tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza, and the group desperately needs our continued support.
More than 50% of their donations have been under $10, so even if you can only give the price of a cup of coffee, it truly makes a difference.
