Three Years of War: What This Family Has Lost and What Still Remains

This article will be republished in October 2026 with a final version reflecting the situation at the actual three year anniversary. I am writing the May 2026 draft now because the reflection itself does not need to wait.

October 2023, Before

Three years ago this October, my family had a different life. I was working as an agricultural engineer. My wife was working part-time at an accounting firm. Ibrahim was three years old. My daughter did not exist yet.

We had an apartment we owned in Gaza City. We had a kitchen organized the way my wife wanted. We had a small balcony with a few plants. We had Friday lunches with extended family. We had plans. The plans involved Ibrahim starting school in 2024, possibly trying for a second child in 2025, possibly buying a slightly bigger apartment as my career advanced.

I want to describe that life because I am noticing, three years in, that I have started to forget the details of it. The mind protects itself by softening what cannot be returned to.

What Has Been Lost

The apartment is gone. Either damaged beyond repair or destroyed entirely; I have not been back to confirm because the area is not accessible. The career is gone, since there is no agricultural sector functioning in Northern Gaza. My wife's career is gone for the same reason. My professional network of colleagues, some of whom were friends, has scattered or in some cases is dead.

The Friday lunches are gone. My uncle, who hosted most of them, is dead. My aunt is in southern Gaza. My cousins are scattered across the strip and the diaspora. We have not all been in one room together in three years.

The plans are gone. Ibrahim did not start school in 2024. The second child existed (the daughter born in December 2025) but did not arrive in the way we imagined. The bigger apartment is no longer a goal; the smaller current apartment is the entire goal.

What Has Been Saved

I want to be careful here because saying "saved" while next to the loss feels uncomfortable. But there are things we have. They are smaller than what was lost but they are real.

My wife is alive. Ibrahim is alive. The baby is alive. I am alive. This sentence is not trivial in 2026. Many fathers writing similar articles three years ago do not have all four people in their household to write that sentence about now.

We are still a family unit, intact, living together. Many displaced families have been split across regions, countries, or worse. We are in one room each night. The children sleep with both parents in the same building. This is a kind of basic continuity that becomes precious when most of it has been lost.

Ibrahim still laughs. He still asks questions. He still draws pictures. He has lost things, including any normal version of childhood, but he has not lost the parts of himself that make him recognizable as a child. This is partly his resilience and partly something I credit to my wife who has worked relentlessly to keep his world feel as much like a child's world as possible.

I have not lost my mind. There were periods, I will be honest, when I wondered if I would. The grief and the daily logistics and the uncertainty are heavy. But I have remained recognizably myself.

What Donor Support Has Meant Across Three Years

I started accepting public donations in 2024 after exhausting savings and after the family network had nothing more to give. By the time I had made the decision to put up a public fundraiser, asking for help did not feel optional anymore.

What donations have done across the past two years and a few months:

• Kept the family in continuous shelter (rent paid every month, no period of homelessness)
• Kept the children fed (no period of zero food, even in months when food was the only spending)
• Funded the prenatal period and birth of my daughter
• Provided baby formula every month since her birth
• Paid for medical care when family members got sick
• Allowed me to spend time on Ibrahim's home education
• Allowed my wife to stay home with the children rather than seek dangerous work

The donation total over the past two years is somewhere around $25,000 to $30,000 across PayPal and GoGetFunding combined, contributed by hundreds of individual donors averaging $20 to $200 each. None of it is from one large donor. All of it is from individual people who decided one at a time to help.

I want to write this clearly because the math of it matters: small donations from many people, sustained over time, has been what kept this family alive. Not one large benefactor. Not a charity foundation. The collective work of strangers.

What I Will Need for Year Four

The war is not over as I write this. I do not know if it will be over by October 2026. The honest assumption I make is that it will not be, or that even if it is, the destruction is so extensive that "after" will not feel materially different from "during" for many months or years. The recovery is its own period, and the family budget continues into it.

Year four needs:

• Continued $1,290 monthly survival budget plus higher winter months
• Education for Ibrahim, however that is possible
• Continued formula and pediatric care for the baby through her first birthday and beyond
• Whatever costs come with a transition out of war if that arrives

Continued recurring monthly support is more useful than one-time donations. If you have given before and can convert to a small monthly amount, that is the most impactful single action available.

A Final Reflection

The thing I have learned over three years is that survival is not the dramatic act people imagine when they read about war from far away. It is mostly small. It is rent paid on time. It is formula in stock. It is bread baked. It is Ibrahim drawing a picture. It is the baby learning to roll over. It is my wife making tea. It is me writing an article.

Survival is the accumulation of small, persistent, ordinary acts performed in conditions that try to make ordinary impossible. The donors who have helped this family have funded that accumulation. Without them, the small acts would have stopped at some point. With them, they have continued through three winters and three summers and a difficult birth and an impossible amount of news.

I do not know how to thank that group properly. This article is one attempt.