r/TheLevant

This is part of their daily life. Every single day, Mahmoud walks a long distances and waits in long lines just to collect a small amount of clean drinking water for his family.

He is responsible for a large family, and making sure they have safe water to drink has become one of his hardest daily struggles. Sometimes they spend hours waiting, only to receive a limited amount of water that barely lasts until the next day.

Something as basic as drinking water has become a constant challenge. Every day begins with the worry of how will Mahmoud provide enough water for his wife and their children.

If you are watching this, I kindly ask for your compassion and support. Your donation, no matter how small, can help them buy clean water and cover their family's most urgent needs while they continue to endure these difficult circumstances.

Thank you for listening, for caring, and for standing with their family. Your kindness gives us hope.

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Hello everyone. My name is Mahmoud, and I am from northern Gaza. I am a husband and the father of four young daughters.

Before the war, we had a simple but stable life. I worked as a hospitality supervisor at a restaurant, and my wife was employed on a contract with a charitable organization. Together, we worked hard to provide a decent life for our family and build a better future for our daughters. Like any parents, our dream was to give them a safe home, food on the table, and a peaceful childhood.

Then the war changed everything. The restaurant where I worked was destroyed, my wife's work contract ended because of the war, and our home was completely reduced to rubble. In a single moment, we lost our home, our jobs, our belongings, and the life we had spent years building.

Since then, every day has become a struggle for survival. My greatest concern is finding food, clean drinking water, medicine, and a safe place where my daughters can sleep without fear. It is heartbreaking to watch your children suffer while feeling powerless to provide even their most basic needs.

Despite everything we have lost, I refuse to give up hope. I still dream of rebuilding our lives and giving my daughters the chance to smile again. But I cannot do it alone.

Today, I am reaching out with humility and hope, asking kind-hearted people to stand with my family. Any support, no matter how small, will bring us one step closer to safety and stability. Your kindness will help us secure shelter and provide essential needs such as food, clean water, and medicine for our daughters. If you are unable to donate, simply sharing our story could help us reach someone who can.

Thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking the time to read our story. Your compassion, support, and prayers mean more to my family than words can ever express.

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I never imagined I would be living a life like this.

My name is Nada. I’m 18 years old from Gaza. This should have been my first year at university, focusing on my education and building my future. Instead, I have watched my home, my city, and the life we loved disappear before my eyes.

My family and I lost our home and were forced to flee. Since then, we’ve been living through displacement, fear, and uncertainty every single day.

I try to live a normal life, but the harsh conditions and the immense destruction around me overwhelm me, and I often find myself breaking down and crying.

Many people believe the war and the suffering are over. Unfortunately, they are not. We still live in fear every day, surrounded by destruction and the constant threat of bombardment.

Life has become a daily struggle just to survive. My siblings and I collect firewood so we can cook, wait in long lines for water, and go to community kitchens hoping to receive a small meal.

The hunger has taken a serious toll on us. My mother and I have lost a lot of weight because there simply isn’t enough food. We have become weak, and every day is a battle to find something to eat or drink. Even something as simple as a glass of cold water feels like a luxury.

While many people my age are enjoying life and building their futures, my days are spent searching for food and trying to help my family survive. This is not the life I ever imagined.

I’m sharing only a small part of what we are going through in Gaza.

I am not asking for luxury or comfort. I am simply asking for help to afford basic necessities like food, clean water, and other essential needs during these incredibly difficult times.

If you’re able to support me, I would be deeply grateful. If you can’t donate, sharing my story would mean a lot.

I’ve included my family’s donation link in the comments.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story.

Today I want to share a moment that says so much about life in Gaza.

This is my friend Samah Ghanem's little daughter, Soso. Even though their family struggles every day to find enough food, she saw a hungry stray cat and immediately shared her small sandwich.

The famine has affected both people and animals. Families go hungry, and even the stray cats search desperately for something to eat. Yet, despite everything she has endured, this little girl's kindness remains untouched.

Samah, her husband Mahmoud, and their four young children are doing everything they can to survive, but every day is a struggle to find food, clean water, and the basic necessities of life.

If this story touched your heart, please consider helping their family. Every donation, no matter how small, can provide food, clean drinking water, and hope during these incredibly difficult days.

Thank you for your kindness, and please share this post so more people can see their story ❤️

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Jacob Israël de Haan was a Dutch lawyer, journalist and poet. A queer man, de Haan published one of the first Dutch novels depicting a homosexual relationship between two men. After becoming interested in Zionism and Jewish nationalism, de Haan emigrated to Palestine in 1918. Not long after he arrived, he disavowed Zionism due to his sympathy with Arabs and his dismay at the conditions the Zionists were creating.

>“Two thousand years of exile and unhappiness have taught them [the Zionists] nothing. Instead of making an attempt to understand the innermost causes of our unhappiness they now try to circumvent it, as it were, by building a “national home” on foundations provided by Western power politics: and in the process of building a national home, they are committing the crime of depriving another people of its home.” — Jacob Israel de Haan, in conversation with Mohammed Asad, 1924

De Haan increasingly grew religious, joined the Haredi community of Jerusalem and became their legal representation. As the main representative of the anti-zionist Haredi Jews, he met regularly with Arab leaders and took an important role in the local and regional opposition to Zionism. 

After multiple threats to his life, on June 30, 1924, he was assassinated by Avraham Tehomi of the Haganah, a Zionist militia that would later become the IDF. He was assassinated the morning he was supposed to leave for London to argue for anti-Zionism. This was the first Zionist political assassination in Mandate Palestine.

>“I have done what the Haganah decided had to be done. And nothing was done without the order of Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (the second president of Israel 1952-1963)... I have no regrets because he (de Haan) wanted to destroy our whole idea of Zionism.” —Avraham Tehomi, the confessed assassin

Despite his homosexuality, he is honored today by Neturei Karta as hero and a martyr.

Sources:

Bush, Lawrence. "June 30: Jacob Israel de Haan” Jewish Currents Magazine, 2014
https://jewishcurrents.org/june-30-jacob-israel-de-haan

Drishya. "The Queer Dissident Zionism Could Not Contain: Jacob Israël de Haan" The Polis Project. April 2026. https://thepolisproject.com/read/jacob-israel-de-haan-queer-anti-zionist/

Giebelas, Ludy. “Jacob Israel de Haan in Mandate Palestine: Was the Victim of the First Zionist Political Assassination a ‘Jewish Lawrence of Arabia’?” Jewish Historical Studies, vol. 46, 2014, pp. 107–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43855720

Witt, Nathan. “Jacob Israel de Haan: A Queer and Lapsed Zionist in Mandate Palestine. Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 87, Autumn 2021. Institute for Palestine Studies. https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1651902

Today marks the thousandth day of the war in Gaza.

A thousand days of fear, hunger, displacement, and waiting.

Has the war ended? Has the killing stopped? Has the hunger ended? Has security returned? Is there anyone who sleeps peacefully without fearing to wake up to bombing or news of another loss?

A thousand days have passed, and we still ask: How long?

If someone had told us on the first day that we would endure a thousand days of this pain, would we have believed them? Could we have imagined all this loss, exhaustion, and despair? And would we cling to life as we do today?

With every round of negotiations, hope is reborn, and we hold onto it with all the strength we have left. Then the negotiations die, and with them, hope dies again. This has happened dozens, even hundreds of times, and yet we still wait.

Perhaps we have learned that hope alone does not end wars, but it is the one thing that war has not been able to completely take from us.

There remains a glimmer of hope in our hearts amidst a barren land, and something still tries to believe that tomorrow might be better than today. Please, don't let hope die within us.

After a thousand days of war, we don't have much left... but we still have hope.

I filmed this video of my little brother today.

He was running around smiling and playing, and for a second it looked like such a normal childhood moment. But when I looked at what he was actually playing with, it broke me.

He had taken a cola can and turned it into something like a little fan, then stuck it onto an empty water bottle. He runs while holding the bottle, and because of the air, the fan spins. That became his toy. That became his game.

And the worst part is that he genuinely loves it.

I keep watching him and thinking: how did it come to this? How did children in Gaza get reduced to making toys out of trash and ruins just to have one small moment of fun? Why does my little brother have to search for happiness in an empty bottle and a cola can instead of having real toys, a safe playground, and a normal life like any child anywhere else?

He doesn’t have parks to run in. He doesn’t have safe streets. The streets around us are destroyed. Childhood here has been stripped down to survival, and even play has become something children have to invent from whatever they can find around them.

It hurts me in a way I can’t fully explain. Because he is still just a child. He should be worrying about cartoons, toys, and games. Not growing up surrounded by destruction. Not learning how to make a toy out of scraps because there is nothing else.

People always talk about the numbers coming out of Gaza, but behind every number is a child like my brother. A child trying to create joy with almost nothing. A child who still deserves softness, safety, laughter, and a real childhood.

I’m sharing this because I want people to see what this war has done, even to the smallest details of life. Not only the deaths, not only the hunger, not only the destruction. But also what it steals from children day by day is their normal lives, their innocence, and the simple things that should never have been taken from them in the first place.

My little brother deserved better than this. Every child here does.