A Letter From a Father in Northern Gaza: May 2026

The following is written directly by Mohammed Z. Al-Shanti, 35, an agricultural engineer displaced in Northern Gaza with his wife, son Ibrahim (6), and daughter (5 months). His identity is verified at donatetogaza.org/verification. Contact: [email protected].

To Anyone Reading This

I am writing this on May 12, 2026. It is early in the morning because mornings are the quietest part of the day here, and quiet is when I think most clearly. My daughter is sleeping. My son is still asleep. My wife is resting. I have approximately one hour before the day begins in full, and I want to use it to write something honest.

I am not a writer by training. I am an agricultural engineer. I studied soil science and irrigation systems and crop yield optimization at Al-Azhar University Gaza. My knowledge is practical and grounded. I understand systems. I understand inputs and outputs and how disruptions in one part of a system cascade into every other part.

Gaza in 2026 is a system under total disruption. I understand it with clarity that is not academic but lived. And I want to explain that clearly to you, because you are considering whether to donate to a stranger in a war zone, and that is a serious decision that deserves serious explanation.

What I Had Before

Before the war I had a career. A professional registration. Work that connected me to land, to growth, to the tangible work of feeding people through agriculture. I was registered with the Palestinian Agricultural Engineers Association. I worked with farmers on irrigation efficiency and crop planning. It was not wealthy work but it was meaningful and it sustained our family.

I had an apartment. Not large, but ours. My wife had a professional background in accounting. Ibrahim was a small child learning to run. We were not prosperous by the standards of people who will read this, but we were stable and purposeful and we had plans. Normal plans. A savings account. Thinking about Ibrahim starting school. Thinking about what kind of future we were building.

All of that became inaccessible when displacement began. The farmland I worked on was destroyed or made unreachable. The agricultural ministry offices were gone. The systems I had spent my professional life understanding were dismantled. I became someone with expertise that had no application in an economy that had ceased to function in any recognizable way.

What I Have Now

I have my wife. I have Ibrahim, who is six years old and has not attended a school building in his life — the war began when he was three — but who is thoughtful and curious and learning at home from whatever materials we can provide. I have my daughter, born in December 2025, who is five months old and whose face in sleep is the clearest argument I know for why the world should not be the way it is right now.

I have a damaged apartment in Northern Gaza. I have a monthly budget of $1,290 that I cannot meet through any form of employment because there is no functioning labor market for my skills here. I have donors around the world who have read my story and chosen to help, and without them I do not know what the last year would have looked like.

I have a ledger. Written in a notebook, every purchase recorded. Flour. Water. Formula. Rent. Medicine. Each entry is my accounting of where generosity went. I am an engineer. Precision is how I express gratitude.

What I Want You to Know About Receiving Help

Asking for help is not easy. In my profession, in my culture, in my understanding of what it means to be a man and a father and a provider — asking strangers for money is not what I imagined for my life. I want to be honest about that. It took time to accept that the situation required it, and longer to build something honest enough that people could trust me.

What I have tried to do is make the act of giving as easy to verify as possible. I published my professional registration. I built a verification page. I responded to every message, every question, every skeptical email. I kept records. I provided receipts. I tried to earn trust through transparency rather than through urgency, because urgency can be manufactured and transparency cannot.

When a donation arrives, I feel something that is hard to name. Gratitude is part of it. Relief is a larger part. The relief of knowing that this week's flour is funded, or that the formula supply has been secured, or that the rent will not be late this month — these are not small things. They are the foundations of my ability to be present for my children rather than consumed by the arithmetic of survival.

What I Want You to Know About Ibrahim

Ibrahim asked me recently where trees come from. I told him about seeds and soil and water and time. He listened carefully, then asked whether there were trees outside our window. There is one — a damaged olive tree that has survived everything this neighborhood has been through. I showed it to him. He studied it for a long time.

I am an agricultural engineer. That tree is my professional context made personal. It has survived conditions that should have killed it, continues to show new growth despite the damage, and is the same species that has been native to this land for centuries. When Ibrahim looked at it, I saw him trying to understand something about permanence and resilience. He is six years old. He has never been to school. But he knows how to look at things carefully.

I want him to go to school. I want him to have teachers and classmates and the social architecture of a normal childhood. When conditions allow, I will put him in school the first available day. Until then, I teach him at home. His mother teaches him. We use whatever materials we can find or receive. He is learning to read. He will be ready.

What I Am Asking For

I am asking for money. I will not dress that in softer language. Money for flour. Money for water. Money for my daughter's formula. Money for rent so my family has a roof. Money for the cooking gas that lets my wife prepare food. Money for the medicine that keeps a small child healthy in conditions that should not exist.

If you can give something, it will reach us directly. You can verify everything about me. You can ask me for receipts. You can email me at [email protected] and I will respond personally. Every question deserves an answer. Every donation deserves a record. That is my end of this agreement.

You can donate via PayPal, GoGetFunding, or five cryptocurrencies. Every method is listed at donatetogaza.org. My verification is at donatetogaza.org/verification. I have tried to make it easy to check and easy to give. The rest is up to you.

Thank you for reading this far.

— Mohammed Z. Al-Shanti
Agricultural Engineer, Northern Gaza, May 2026

Before the War: The Life That Was

I want you to know what existed before, because it is relevant to what has been taken, and because I am tired of people imagining that Gaza was always like this.

I was an agricultural engineer with active professional registration. I worked on projects related to soil management, water efficiency, and crop yield for small-scale Palestinian farmers. It was work I found genuinely meaningful — the intersection of science and food security in a place where food security has always been politically contested.

My wife and I had an apartment. A real apartment with working utilities — electricity for most of the day, running water, an oven that worked. On Fridays she cooked elaborate meals. I remember the smell specifically. Ibrahim was a toddler who had strong opinions about bananas. We had a small olive tree in a pot on the balcony that my wife insisted on keeping through three moves.

The olive tree is still alive. It is smaller than it should be and has not produced fruit in the conditions we are in, but it is alive. My wife waters it with the small amount she can spare from our rationed water supply. I think about that olive tree more than makes logical sense given everything else happening.

Ibrahim, at six, has grown up knowing only the current situation. He has never eaten a banana. He has never sat in a classroom. He does not know what a functioning city sounds like at night — the normal sounds of traffic, neighbors, music from a wedding down the street. He only knows this silence and this noise, and they are not the same thing.

Why I Decided to Ask Publicly

I want to tell you about the moment I decided to do this. It was not a dramatic decision. It was a practical one, but it felt like crossing a line, and I want to name the line clearly.

I am an educated professional. I have a professional registration. I have a specific identity in my community. In Palestinian culture — in many cultures — a man asking publicly for help is understood as a statement of failure or desperation. I held this belief long enough that it almost prevented me from setting up this campaign.

What changed: my daughter was born in December 2025. Three weeks after her birth, formula supply dropped sharply and prices spiked. I did the math. I looked at what we had, what we needed, and what I could earn given that my professional work had been entirely suspended by the destruction of the infrastructure I worked within. The math did not work.

I published the campaign that week. Within the first month, donations arrived from people I had never met, in countries I have never visited, who read my words and decided to help. I had underestimated both the generosity of strangers and the power of a specific, verifiable, honest account of a real situation.

I no longer feel that asking is failure. I feel that refusing to ask would have been a kind of pride that my children could not afford.

What I Think About Donors

I think about donors more than they probably expect. When a donation notification arrives on my phone, I know there is a person somewhere — sitting at a desk or on a phone on a train or lying in bed — who saw my words and chose to act. This happens at some cost to them, however small, and with no direct personal benefit.

I find this remarkable. I have been thinking about what motivates it, and I believe the answer is something like: a refusal to accept that physical distance means moral distance. The world has made it possible to close the gap between someone in Northern Gaza with a five-month-old on formula and someone in Toronto or London or Kuala Lumpur with ten dollars and a PayPal account. Some people, when presented with that possibility, close the gap. I am grateful for each one of them.

If you have donated to this campaign, you have bought flour and formula and water and rent. You have kept Ibrahim's sister fed. You have kept Ibrahim in an apartment rather than more exposed circumstances. You have kept my wife from making impossible choices between formula and food. You did this with money that, in your world, does less than it does in mine. I think about this every time I open the market and buy flour with money that arrived from a stranger.

This Month: What We Need Right Now

I will be specific about May 2026 because specificity is honesty and honesty is what makes this campaign trustworthy.

Rent is due: $500. Formula is running low — I need two tins within the next ten days: $56. Food for the rest of the month: approximately $280 for staples. Water delivery: $60. That totals approximately $896 for the core survival needs for the remainder of May.

If the campaign receives $200 this week, I buy formula and emergency food. If it receives $400, I cover formula, food, and water. If it receives $900, I cover everything including rent. Every amount in between addresses part of the need in order of urgency.

I am not asking you to solve everything. I am asking you to send what you can to the address that is verified and documented and responsive. Whatever you send will be used exactly as I describe, and I will document it, and you will see the documentation if you ask for it. That is my commitment to you in return.

What I Have Learned from Donors

I have been doing this campaign long enough to have learned something from donors as a group, and I want to share what I have learned because I think it might be useful to people considering whether to give.

What I have learned: the people who donate are not primarily motivated by guilt. They are motivated by something closer to recognition — they recognize a situation that is unjust and they recognize that they have capacity to affect it, even slightly. The donation is an expression of that recognition as much as it is an expression of charity.

Some donors have written to me after giving. They describe relief — the relief of having done something in the face of a situation that most people experience as overwhelming and out of their control. The helplessness of watching a crisis from a distance is genuinely difficult, and a specific, verifiable action — $50 to a named person with a documented family — addresses that helplessness in a way that general awareness and sharing does not.

I am grateful for this. The donors who give are not just helping my family — they are helping themselves find a way to live with their awareness of this situation without being paralyzed by it. I find this relationship honest and mutual. They give me money that buys flour. I give them a documented specific action. Both parties leave the transaction with something real.

The Hardest Moment of This Year

I want to be honest about the hardest moment I have experienced this year, because I think honest accounts are what distinguish real stories from constructed ones.

In March 2026, we had a period of 11 days where formula was unavailable at any price in our neighborhood market. My daughter was three months old. I traveled further than I should have — beyond the range I consider reasonably safe — to find formula in a different area of Northern Gaza. I found it at a premium price, bought as much as I could afford, and carried it home.

The hardest part was not the journey or the price. The hardest part was telling my wife when I left, in front of Ibrahim, that I was going to get formula, and watching Ibrahim's face as he processed what that meant — that his father was going somewhere difficult to get food for his baby sister. He is six years old. He understood more than I wanted him to.

I came back. I had formula. We fed her. The 11 days resolved. I am telling you this because I think you should know what a formula shortage actually involves for a father in Northern Gaza in 2026. It is not an abstraction. It is a journey I made with a specific purpose and a specific outcome. The next time formula runs short, donor support is what determines whether I have to make that journey again or whether I can simply go to the local market.

What I Would Do If This Ends

People sometimes ask me what I will do when the war ends. It is a question that assumes an ending, which I believe in as a matter of necessity rather than certainty. But I think about it.

I am an agricultural engineer. Gaza was a significant agricultural producer before the war — citrus, strawberries, olives, vegetables. The agricultural infrastructure — orchards, greenhouses, irrigation systems, soil — has been substantially damaged or destroyed. Rebuilding it will require exactly the kind of technical expertise that engineers like me provide.

I want to be part of that reconstruction. I want to work again in the actual field I trained for, using the knowledge I have, contributing to the food security of my community. I want Ibrahim to see his father working — not managing a survival campaign, but building something. I want to show him what professional life looks like when it is possible.

Between now and then, I am asking for what my family needs to survive to that point. The campaign this page represents is not what I chose for my life. It is what the situation requires. I am running it as well as I can, with as much honesty and documentation as I can manage, because it is the only tool I have to bridge the distance between my family's needs and the resources that would meet those needs.

Thank you for reading this far. Thank you for considering. Whatever you decide, I want you to know that I wrote this for you specifically — not for an audience in the abstract, but for the person reading these words right now, deciding what to do next. I hope you decide to help. And I hope that if you do, the documentation and accountability this campaign provides confirms that your decision was the right one.

Mohammed Z. Al-Shanti, Northern Gaza, May 2026 — [email protected]