Canary journalist Alaa Shamali is trying to get his family – of five children – safely out of Gaza, but needs your help to make it happen.
Palestinian journalist Alaa Shamali has written unflinchingly on the countless heinous atrocities Israel has perpetrated in Gaza. A little more than a week before the colonial settler state broke the first 2025 supposed ceasefire in March, Alaa started penning his heart-rending prose for the Canary. Now, seven months on, and at the fragile precipice of another so-called ceasefire, his haunting words continue to echo out in the vacuum of a Western mainstream media still clamouring to cover for genocidal war criminals.
Everything he writes, he does with the harrowing clarity and poignancy that can only come from experience and truly knowing the gut-wrenching reality of life under Israeli bombardment and occupation. Because as he has recounted the horrifying details of Israel’s “strangling siege” leaving three-quarters of children in Gaza malnourished, eating sand and drinking contaminated water, and living displaced in “torn tents”, he has told these stories as a record too of his own family’s devastating reality.
Canary journalist Alaa Shamali: an urgent fundraiser for his family in Gaza
As his family’s GoFundMe details, they have been:
living in a small tent, barely 3 meters in size.
It compels readers to try to imagine the utter heartbreak and struggle of:
spending every day, every night, and every moment in such cramped conditions. They need urgent support to rebuild their home and regain a sense of normalcy.
However, it also caveats this with the unfaltering fact that what Alaa’s family has lived through amounts to “unimaginable hardship and loss”.
Because, as for many families in Gaza, this current genocide was not the first time Israel destructively uprooted their lives. The GoFundMe relays how Israel has demolished their home, not once, not twice, but three times in little over the last decade:
Their home in Gaza has been destroyed three times by the wars on Gaza in 2014, 2021, and now again in 2024. Each time they have painstakingly rebuilt their lives and their home, but this time, they have lost not only their home but also any source of income. The compensation for their 2021 home destruction is still pending, and now they face the devastating reality of losing their home once more.
Dima and Ibada: stolen childhoods
Alaa has previously written heartbreakingly as a father:
deprived of the most basic right of fatherhood: to see his five children walk to school in Gaza with peace of mind.
He has recounted the hopes and dreams of his five children – currently living in a displacement camp in Gaza. There’s 15-year-old Dima, his eldest who waits in the displacement tent wondering if she will get the chance to return to school. Alaa penned a particularly painful exchange, where Dima has asked her father:
Dad… will I be able to continue my studies?
And he wrote with palpable grief:
I hear her question echoing inside me at night like an absent school bell. I try to smile and tell her, “You will continue,” but my voice betrays me. How can I reassure her when all I have is my pen, while all the roads to school are blocked by rubble?
The crowdfunder adds another tinge of utter anguish over Dima’s desire for the most basic things a young teenager might hope for, simply:
decorating her room with the best furniture and devices, to build a future alongside her four younger siblings.
Israel has forced next eldest 13-year-old Ibada to grow up “before his time”, stealing his childhood so:
His voice, which used to be full of enthusiasm, has become hoarse with waiting.
Alaa wrote that it’s as if he carries:
the burdens of adults while still a child.
Salah, Abdullah, and Lina: playing in the corridors of displacement
Alaa’s 12-year-old son Salah has a “deep love for football” and he:
admires stars like Messi, Ronaldo, and Mohamed Salah.
When the fundraiser started in June 2024, Salah hadn’t watched “a match in nine months”. He had already missed an entire school year. Well over a year on, Alaa wrote how Salah and ten-year-old son Abdullah:
were the mirror of childhood in my home. Their laughter on the way to school and their running on the way back gave me the feeling that life was still possible despite the war.
Today, he says:
that innocence has been stolen from them, and they play in the corridors of displacement instead of schoolyards.
However, what “breaks” Alaa’s heart “the most” is his “little girl”, his youngest, 6-year-old Lina:
When I look at her, I feel that her entire childhood is being silently assassinated. She is growing up outside of school, like a flower without water, and her pain alone is enough to fill a thousand news reports. But all I can do is carry her silence and broadcast it to the world.
In her own words, Lina has captured the plaintive tragedy of a child growing up under constant genocidal siege:
Bombing over our heads and such. Nothing but missiles above us. We get hit a lot. Leave behind our childhood. I’m still a little girl.
And Lina has expressed the most simple hope of all children in Gaza:
End the war – we are children – we want to live.
Support Alaa’s family to seek safety and rebuild their lives
Now, Gaza has entered another ceasefire – but Lina’s wish still goes unanswered. Predictably, and as last time, Israel continues to violate it with impunity. It’s still bombing, still murdering, and still maiming Palestinians in refugee camps.
And all the while, it is maintaining the key ingredients of its engineered famine, namely, its blockades severing access to sorely-needed aid. The UNRWA has detailed that 6,000 trucks loaded with food, tents, and medicines enough for the entire population of Gaza for three months:
remain stuck at the Gaza border, waiting to be allowed in.
It’s why Alaa’s family needs your help to move to Egypt, where:
they can find safety and begin to rebuild their lives. Every donation, no matter the amount, can make a significant difference. Please donate to help this family escape the horrors of war and start anew.
As Alaa himself has written, Gaza:
does not ask for pity, but for justice. It does not ask only for aid, but for the right to live like others. It asks to sleep without fear, to open a school, or to light a small lamp at night without it being considered a luxury.
For his family and others from Gaza to live safe, secure, fulfilling lives once more, is a powerful act of resistance after two years of genocide. In the spirit of mutual aid and solidarity, the Canary implores readers, wherever they can, to continue supporting Palestinians’ crowdfunders.
Alaa has been supporting his family as he writes full-time for the Canary. But amid the immense costs of essentials in Gaza, and the enormous expenses of them leaving the Strip for a new life, his wages can only go so far. You can donate to Alaa’s family’s fundraiser here.
Feature image supplied.
This post was originally published on Canary.