Gaza Emergency Relief Appeal

Gaza families send a warm thank you to all the wonderful donors for shielding them against the harsh winter. Your support enabled Rebuilding Alliance's NGO partners in Gaza to distribute blankets, heaters, and plastic tarps for roofs to those most in need.

Since its launch, this project has been helping beleaguered families in Gaza in various ways, through the provision of relief during the bombing of May 2021, undertaking home repairs, payment of loans, house rents, medical care etc. Your support has helped thousands of people in Gaza. 

Rebuilding Alliance learned from its NGO partners in Gaza about the challenges Gaza families were facing due to the cold weather. We decided on a winter intervention, and $8,000 was allocated toward this initiative.  

Our partners at Women Programs Center-Rafah distributed blankets among 46 families, giving three blankets to each family. These families live in Rafah and Khan Younis. A staff member of WPC-R shared, "When we reached their houses, we saw the poor living conditions of these families. The families thanked us and prayed for us." 

A beneficiary said, "Thank you! We badly needed these blankets. Our bodies could not bear the cold. As you can see, we don't live in houses. We live in tents, and the cold reaches us from all sides."

El Amal Rehabilitation Organization gave out electric heaters to 100 families with little to no income. These families are struggling on so many levels, financial and social, and the winter season should not be an added challenge, says Bahaa with our partner organization, El Amal. Heating can provide comfort and prevent cold-related illnesses such as hypothermia and pneumonia. A warm and comfortable home improves the overall quality of life of low-income families. 

Youth Vision Society reached out to 45 families with blankets, two for each family, and rainproof tarps. These families live in Beach Refugee Camp, one of the most marginalized areas of Gaza. The houses are old, and nearly half of them are in need of restoration. Families that live in houses with old asbestos roofs that leak during rain were especially prioritized for assistance. Nylon tarps were laid on the roofs by YVS staff members. These supplies helped these families get through the winter.

Our partners, Al Basma Club for the Disabled, work with persons with disabilities in Gaza and maintain a database of these people. ABCD wanted to help the disabled persons of the Gaza community with a supply of diapers and hygiene kits. A total of 100 disabled people benefited from these supplies, including children, young children and the elderly.

Thank you for keeping hundreds of Gaza people warm this winter and making all this wonderful work possible.

In the wake of the May 2023 Gaza bombing that lasted five days, our NGO partners provided 200 families in Gaza with essential food supplies. Please let your family and friends know about this effort. 

Thanks for all that you do! 

Your generosity has helped thousands of families under through the Gaza Emergency Relief Fund by providing them assistance where needed most. In 2014 this project team learned how to provide emergency food during the 51 days of bombing when tens of thousands of family took refuge in UN schools.  The Israeli Army dropped 1000 bombs each day.  Later in the 2021 bombings (May 10-21st), we drew upon that experience to provide diapers and even cleaning supplies when families took refuge in UN schools.

Afterwards, during recovery periods, Rebuilding Alliance used this project to send shipping containers with gently used clothing and to provide school supplies to 3888 children in the hardest-hit schools.

Now this project provides where needed most, focusing on the specific needs of individual families and helping them get back on their feet. Rebuilding Alliance is currently working to finish current project commitments and we are also asking our four Palestinian Non Government Org partners to assess the needs of their local communities and propose new project. 

Here’s one of the new project proposals:
A father in need reached out recently to Youth Vision Society, our NGO partner in Gaza City. Dr. Bahaa is a father of an eleven-year-old boy named Omar who needs help with medical treatment and rehabilitation.

• On the fateful day of January 24, 2021, Omar was hit by a car, causing a severe brain injury that left him  paraplegic. After fighting a life-and-death battle in a coma for five months, he regained consciousness. In consultation with other doctors, his father opted for special medical treatment in Turkey. They have taken two trips to Turkey so far.
  
  
• Like all parents, Omar's parents did all they could to see their child healthy again. They sold nearly everything they had, including their land and the mother’s gold jewelry, to pay for Omar’s medical treatment.
  
  
• Omar is unable to stand or walk independently because of stiffness and needs physiotherapy sessions. He is also in need of other medical treatments, including speech therapy, psychological therapy, special education — Dr. Bahaa has started a crowd fund.
  
  
• RA’s Proposal focuses on contruction:  Our site engineer visited the family to assess their needs. The family lives on the third floor and they need a way to bring Omar up the stairs each day — a stair lift may be just the solution. We’ll keep you posted as details take shape. 

Thank you for being part of this amazing project to help Gaza families meet their critical needs.

The Gaza Emergency Relief project is all about responding to urgent needs including helping families get back on their feet by finding income (eg. job training, agriculture inputs, or micro-business grants) and also about making homes healthy, safe, and more liveable. When we learned of three families in Gaza with disabilities who are struggling with housing, Site Engineer Heba visited to learn more. 

Each of these families have teenage and adult children with Phenylketonuria (PKU), a genetic condition in which they cannot digest a fundamental amino acid called phenylalanine. Without special medical food, cumulative brain damage results. When we learned that the Palestinian Department of Health stopped sending medical food to PKU families in Gaza, Rebuilding Alliance set about raising funds to sponsor children and deliver medical food as best we can. As our partner team at Youth Vision Society got to know the families, they asked for Eng. Heba's assistance to resolve a different level of emergency: housing.

Eng. Heba, has always been passionate about affordable housing and supporting families in need, and is an expert in architectural engineering. She meets with families to understand their needs before creating a design, and then works with each of our partner NGOs to develop their Request for Proposal, review their bids, and assess each stage of constuction through to final sign-off. 

Heba met with three families who need assistance:

• Mena is a 17-year-old girl with PKU who is mentally disabled and in chronic pain, unable to perform basic tasks without assistance. Mena is isolated from the outside world and spends most of her time in her room. The room Mena lives in is small and barren, lacking even a bed or chairs. She shares this room with her seven siblings, two of whom also suffer from PKU.
  
  Heba’s plan is to split Mena's room so that the boys and girls could live in separate quarters and have privacy, then to buy furniture. Heba also has plans for renovating the kitchen and bathroom. Her renovations would include basics like tiling and plumbing and also would make these spaces more accessible, organizable, and comfortable. 

• Husam is a 34 year old married man with PKU. His condition has caused damage to his brain and body, making movement difficult for him. He lives in the same house as his five brothers and their wives and children. Husam and his wife find themselves frustrated by the lack of privacy that comes from sharing a single room with so many other families.
  
  Husam’s bed is very old, worn down, and in need of repair. Why repair? He has an emotional attachment to this bed and would prefer it was repaired rather than receiving a new one. He is also in dire need of new clothes because he has very few things for himself. Husam struggles with finding work as many potential employers are reluctant or unwilling to hire someone with a disability. 

• The H. family in Gaza has 5 sons and daughters, all of whom have been diagnosed with PKU. They are adults ages 30 to 37, however they are all very reliant on their parents' care because of their disabilities. As the parents are getting older, they worry about who will support their children, especially because having PKU carries a stigma.They have essentially no outside personal or medical support, making caring for them extremely difficult.
  
  These 5 PKU adults have next to no furniture: no beds, chairs, or dressers.  The house has no windows — so we want to provide furniture and windows too. The bathroom needs to be completely refurbished including shower and sink work, and some tile work. They also need help to install and get access to electricity. 

Your support has been invaluable in addressing big needs and challenges for Gazan families facing big challenges — we'll need everyone's help on these three too. The total cost for addressing the needs of these three families is $7,500. 

As funding arrives, Engineer Heba and the YVS team will do their best to address the important construction and furnishing projects to improve each home — that's the first step. We'll keep you posted as the projects move forward.

My name's Sara Azmoudeh, and I'm a Communications Coordinator at Rebuilding Alliance. I recently interviewed Site Engineer Heba to learn about her work as part of Rebuilding Alliance's Gaza Emergency Relief Fund.

Last fall, Engineer Heba joined Rebuilding Alliance to expand the Gaza Emergency Relief Fund to help more families in Gaza make their meager homes liveable. Born and raised in Gaza, Palestine, she is an architectural site engineer with a bachelor's degree in architecture from the Islamic University of Gaza and has experience in construction supervision. Engineer Heba came highly recommended by a Gaza architect who is currently a fellow at Harvard. 

This project requires special skill: the ability to stick to a very tight budget while spec'ing construction solutions that meet the family’s needs. Eng. Heba works with all four of Rebuilding Alliance's NGO partners, traveling from the North to the South of Gaza to do this. 

From January to March, Heba worked with two of Rebuilding Alliance's partner organizations, the Women Programs Center — Rafah (WPC-R), and the Youth Vision Society (YVS), to refurbish eight homes. Here are the WPC-R project highlights:

• Mr. Abed's family consists of 8 individuals, one of whom suffers from liver disease. Our team was able to complete all of the home repairs the family requested, including repairing the leaky kitchen roof. 
  
  
• Mrs. Sharifa's family of four needed fundamental re-working done to their kitchen and bathroom and new windows and doors to help them cope with Gaza's hot summers and cold winters. Heba worked with YVS to spec the bids then signed-off after local contractors completed plastering and tiling, installing the sink mixer and washbasin in their bathroom and kitchen, painting the walls and repairing electrical wiring.
  
  
• Single mother Mrs. Maha and her two children had a newly constructed home that was incomplete, and so the family had yet to move in. Eng. Heba identified what was needed: tiling installation, aluminum windows, and an aluminum door for the restroom. The work was complete in just six days!
  
  
• In March, Eng. Heba upgraded a home for a 28-year-old woman who has Multiple Sclerosis (MS), a rare debilitating disease of the brain and the central nervous system. She lives with her mother and father on the upper floor of the house, and her married brothers live on the ground floor. When Eng. Heba first met with her, she gave her lots of time to speak about herself and describe her needs. Based on her assessment, our whole team concluded that she needed support both physically and mentally. In addition to home renovations, our partners at the Al Amal Center for Rehabilitation provides transit and services so that the young woman vists twice weekly to participate in a variety of activities. In Heba's words, "Before our intervention, she could not move around her home freely or use her bathroom because no aspect of it was fit for disabled persons. We spent a lot of time designing a bathroom for her unique needs and added grab rails for her to move around her home more easily."
  
  She went on to say, "This case is exceptional. Redesigning her home improved her physical well-being and her mental well-being. Having the ability to move around her home independently has given her new confidence. When I first met her, she seemed like a quiet, timid woman. Now, I know that's far from true; whenever I see her, she has a story to tell me and plans to share."

With YVS, four family homes located in Gaza's Al-Shati Refugee Camp (also known as Beach Camp) were refurbished.  The matriarch of the Ali family told Eng. Heba that she needs to reconstruct her home because "we suffer from many issues including darkness, dampness, and cracks in the walls." Eng. Heba signed-off on YVS's work as they installed new bathroom and kitchen essentials including granite counter tops, sinks, and fixtures, plastered, painted, and tiled.

Thank you for supporting Heba's incredible work though the Gaza Emergency Relief Fund. I will leave you all with something Heba told me during our call that motivates my mission to empower her work in Gaza. I hope you will feel the same: 

"When I meet the families and learn of their experiences, it is all deeply personal. These families are part of me. We often live in the same city; we are part of one community. I try my best to make them happy and support them. Even though I know my help won't satisfy all their many needs, our help goes a long way."

Until next time,

We have an exciting announcement. The Gaza Emergency Relief Fund is ramping up to do more rehabilitation and construction. Our goal is to use your donations to build customized quality housing for the most marginalized families as we work with them to help them find sustainable ways to earn a living despite the blockade.  Big challenges.
 

Two new team members are joining Rebuilding Alliance:  Site Engineer Heba El Khozondar and Gaza Architect / Harvard Fellow Salem Al Qudwa.

• Site Engineer Heba El Khozondar is a graduate of the Islamic University of Gaza with 10 years of experience as an architectural engineer. Working with RA’s Non-Governmental Partners, she will meet with families in need to develop plans to fix or improve their homes, and participate in the bidding process to choose an acceptable contractor, and inspect construction.
  
  
• Architectural Engineer Salem Al Qudwa holds B.Arch and M.Arch from the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) in Palestine (2003, 2013), and a Phd in Design from Oxford School of Architecture in England (2019). He is currently a Harvard Fellow in Conflict and Peace at the Religion and Public Life program program in Harvard Divinity School which describes him as, “An award-winning architect and university lecturer, Salem explores everyday architecture as a resource for positive social transformation. His project at Harvard is to design and articulate a model for the reconstruction of communities devastated by conflict. By recognizing the agency and social responsibility of architects, he wants to confront conventional attitudes surrounding residential reconstruction in Gaza by creating a nurturing and safe environment for women and children, and empowering communities.” He’s bringing his insight to Rebuilding Alliance as a program advisor.
  
  

Here’s what we’ve completed in the last 4 months, since my last report: 

In June we paid off the 80k debt incurred when RA’s four NGO partners delivered emergency supplies during the bombings in May. When they saw families hiking through the dark to take refuge in UN schools, we knew how to help and we trusted that many people would step up to donate. Store managers trusted that RA would make good on our pay-forward promise, and we did.

Housing and rent relief were our priorities for the summer as families ungently needed to recover from the damages of the bombings in May. Sadly, one housing rehabilitation remains incomplete because prices skyrocketed in the middle of the project when Israel closed the border, preventing the arrival of construction materials including the windows we were waiting for. We hope to address this very soon as the borders are open now (though our partners report that construction materials are still expensive). Three of our NGO partners completed the following work for 12 families:
 

Women Programs Center Rafah: 

• The Women Program Center — Rafah was able to build a small new house (645 sq. feet) for $5000.  Rania, a mother of two whose husband is ill, was nearly homeless. Now they have a home with a bathroom, indoor plumbing, electricity, tiled flooring, and a backup generator. That said, hers is the house that is not yet finished. Rania says that her children are happy. The bathroom allows them to have a bath to cool down in hot weather, and the generator installed means they won't be scared of the dark when the power goes out. We look forward to completing Rania's house soon.
  
  

Soon after the bombings, a masjed (mosque) in Wales reached out to us to ask if we could specifically help families whose homes were damage by bombing. With thanks to them, our partners decided to focus on families in the north--the area hardest hit.

Al Basma Club for the Disabled: 

• ABCD helped five families living in Jabalya Refugee Camp. Three families now have proper kitchens and bathrooms. One family received a month’s rent relief. Another received food, milk, and diapers for their children.
  
  
• ABCD also had issues with supplies getting more expensive after the border closed, but the contractors in the project lowered their fees to help these two families. The contractors offered this without being asked by ABCD. ABCD also did their best to find affordable vendors.
  
  
• A young man from one of the families was rejected by his fiancee’s father because of his disability and the poor state of his home that was hit by shrapnel. However, after ABCD helped him rehabilitate his home, his father-in-law approved the wedding, and the couple were married on September 29th. Mr. Eid, ABCD’S Executive Director, was invited to the wedding and sent us a video of the men dancing!
  
  

Youth Vision Society

• YVS helped six families whose windows were blown out. Rehabilitation varied from window repair to kitchen and bathroom renovations. One family also received a month’s rent relief.
  
  
• Father of three, Ibrahim, said, "Having dilapidated windows made my home insecure and affected everyone in my home, especially in winter time. Now they are fixed up, I feel that I'm well prepared to welcome the winter with a warm heart."
  
  

Thank you so much for helping Gaza families heal and rebuild their lives. We're honored that you care about them and keep them in your hearts.

Links:

• Aesthetic Value of Minimalist Architecture in Gaza, Mr. Al Qudwa
• Mr. Al Qudwa interviews a Gaza family about housing (Eng. sub)
• Celebrating at the wedding (video)