I Am a Father in Northern Gaza. Here Is How to Donate Directly to My Family in 2026.

This morning, before I wrote a single word of this

I woke up at 5am because my daughter was crying. She is three and a half months old and she does not sleep through the night. My wife was already awake, feeding her with the last of the formula we had. I lay there in the dark doing the math in my head. Formula costs $18 for a small tin that lasts about four days. Rent is due in six days. The water tank is about one third full. We have roughly two weeks of flour left if we are careful with it.

This is not a dramatic opening designed to make you feel bad. This is simply what 5am looks like when you are a father in Northern Gaza in 2026. The math is always running. It never stops. You fall asleep doing it and you wake up doing it.

Ibrahim woke up an hour later. He is five years old and he still does not understand why we cannot go home. Our real home, the one he remembers, is in a neighborhood we have not been able to return to. He drew a picture of it last week. A house with four windows and a garden with a tree. He labeled it "baytna" in Arabic. Our house. He shows it to me sometimes like a reminder, as if I might have forgotten.

I have not forgotten. I think about it every single day. But right now, what I can do is write this. I can explain to you, as directly and honestly as I know how, what it means to donate directly to a Gaza family in 2026, what it actually changes, and how to do it with none of your money lost to fees or administrators or charity salaries. If you came here looking to help, I want to give you the clearest possible path to do that.

Who I am, and why I am asking

My name is Mohammed Ziad Al-Shanti. Before October 2023, I was an agricultural engineer with a salary, a home, and a life that felt ordinary in all the ways that matter. I was not wealthy but I was stable. I paid my bills. I bought my son new clothes when he outgrew his old ones. My wife and I were planning for a second child.

We have been displaced six times since then. Six times I packed what we could carry and moved my family somewhere else, hoping it would be safer, hoping we could stay. Each time we could not stay for long. The apartment we live in now is the sixth place we have called home since our real home became unreachable. It has cracked walls, windows that do not fully close, and a roof that let water in during the last rain. It is $500 a month. We pay it because we have no other choice.

I am telling you this not because I want your pity. I am telling you because I want you to understand who is receiving your donation if you choose to give. Not an organization. Not a fund. Me. Mohammed. An engineer who cannot work because there is no infrastructure left to work on, a father who cannot stop the math from running in his head at 5am, and a husband watching his wife stretch every resource to the edge of what is possible.

I have verified my identity publicly. Government-issued photo ID. Video proof from inside Gaza. A GoGetFunding campaign with over two years of consistent updates and receipts. You can see all of it at donatetogaza.org/verification. I have nothing to hide and everything to be transparent about.

What survival actually costs us right now

I want to be specific with you because specificity is what makes the difference between a number that feels abstract and a number that feels real. So here is our actual monthly budget in Northern Gaza in 2026.

We need $1,290 a month to keep this family of four housed, fed, and with clean water. We have no income. Everything comes from people like you, who find this page, read it, and decide to help.

Now let me show you what your donation actually looks like on our end.

Why donating directly to my family beats every charity on that Google results page

If you searched for "donate to Gaza" before you found this page, you saw a lot of charity lists. UNICEF. Islamic Relief. Oxfam. UNRWA. Anera. They all have professional websites, proper logos, and donation buttons. They are real organizations doing real work.

But here is something none of those pages will tell you: before any of your donation reaches a family in Gaza, it passes through layers of costs that quietly take a significant portion of it. Staff salaries in London and New York. Office rent. International compliance teams. Fundraising operations to raise more money. Annual audit costs. All of it is legitimate. All of it is also not reaching Gaza.

On a $100 donation, the difference between giving to a large UN agency and giving directly to my family is $30. That $30 is one week of clean water. That is not a rounding error. That is a week of my children not being thirsty.

There is also a second difference that matters just as much: speed. When you donate to my PayPal, the money is accessible within 48 hours. When you donate to a large charity, the aid delivery timeline depends on procurement, logistics, staffing, access negotiations, and distribution cycles. Those things take weeks at minimum and months in many cases.

I am not saying large charities are wrong. Hospitals need funding. Medical teams need support. Infrastructure repair requires organizations with scale. But for feeding and housing a specific family right now this week, direct giving is faster, cheaper, and more accountable than anything else available.

Ibrahim and his sister: the reason every dollar matters

Ibrahim is five years old and he has not been to school in over a year. The school near our previous home is not functional. There are no textbooks. There is no consistent teacher. There is no safe building. When I explain to him why he cannot go, he nods like he understands but I can see in his face that he does not really understand, not the way I need him to.

He spends his days in the apartment. He draws. He asks questions. He builds small towers out of whatever objects he can find and then carefully knocks them over and starts again. Sometimes I sit with him and he shows me his drawings and explains them in detail, naming every person and every tree and every part of the imaginary house we live in inside his pictures. He has a very particular vision of where we will live one day. It has a red door.

His sister was born into this. She has never known anything different. She has spent every single day of her three and a half months inside this apartment, or in someone's arms moving between this apartment and somewhere nearby. She is healthy. She is growing. She smiles now, and when she does Ibrahim laughs, and for a moment it sounds exactly like it is supposed to sound.

I tell you about them because they are the reason I built this campaign. I am not asking for myself. I would endure whatever I had to endure. But I cannot watch my son lose another year of his childhood and my daughter begin her life this way without doing everything I can to keep them fed, safe, and housed. This campaign is that effort. Your donation to Gaza is how you become part of it.

How to donate directly to my family: it takes about 90 seconds

I want to make this as simple as possible because I know that friction kills good intentions. Here is exactly what happens when you donate via PayPal.

If you prefer the GoGetFunding route, the process is the same. The campaign page shows our full history of donations and updates going back to 2023. You can see what has been raised, what has been used for, and what we still need. GoGetFunding takes approximately 5% in platform fees, which is still far lower than any NGO overhead.

What people who have already donated say

I want to share what some of our supporters have told us because I think it matters for you to hear from people who have already made this decision.

What I do with your donation and how you can verify it

Every major purchase gets a receipt. I photograph it. I post it. Food receipts, water delivery receipts, rent receipts. All of them are documented and available on the GoGetFunding campaign page and occasionally on this website's updates section.

I do not spend donor money on anything that is not a direct survival need. I have never taken a donation and bought myself something comfortable or non-essential. The money goes to the four things that keep this family alive: rent, food, water, and medicine for the children.

You can verify my identity at any time. My government-issued ID is on the verification page. Video proof from inside Gaza is posted regularly. The GoGetFunding campaign shows the full donation and update history without any edits or gaps. There is nothing I am hiding and nothing I am unwilling to show.

I am going to ask you directly now

You have read this far. That means something in you responded to what I wrote. You are not the kind of person who clicks away when confronted with something real. I respect that, and I want to talk to you directly for a moment.

I do not know where you are reading this. Maybe you are in a warm apartment with a full refrigerator. Maybe you are on your phone on the way to work. Maybe you found this at 11pm after seeing something about Gaza in the news and not knowing what to do with the feeling it left you.

Whatever brought you here, I want you to know that the donation button below is the most direct line between you and my family that exists. There is no charity board between us. No administrator who decides how the money gets allocated. No quarterly report that tells you it went somewhere vague. It goes from your account to mine and I use it to keep my children fed and housed.

If you can give $25, that is one week of clean water for four people. If you can give $50, that is two weeks of food. If you can give $100 or more, I will send you a receipt of every single thing I buy with it. If you can only give $10, I will not pretend that is nothing. It is two days of bread for my son. It is real and it matters.

And if you cannot give money right now, sharing this page costs nothing and might put it in front of someone who can. That is also a form of help and I am grateful for it.