Just Delivered: 282,000 Meals In Gaza

It got cold this week.

You’ll have felt it. That first morning where you stand at the door and go back for a jacket.

And then the craving starts, because it does for all of us. Something hot. The thick jumper from the back of the wardrobe. Soup. The heating on an hour earlier than you meant to. A blanket over your legs while you watch something.

We don’t even think of it as luxury. It’s just what October is.

Now take all of it away.

No jumper. No blanket. No door. No heating, because there’s no electricity. No hot drink, because there’s no gas. No soup, because there’s no soup.

A sheet of plastic over four poles, and sand underneath.

That’s winter in Gaza. The third one.

And here’s what people don’t understand about cold in a tent. It isn’t the temperature that kills. It’s the wet.

When it rains there, it comes underneath. The ground turns to mud and the mud comes inside, and everything you own is on that ground. The blankets, the mats, the clothes, the children.

And once it’s wet, it stays wet. There’s no radiator. No dryer. No spare anything. A child whose clothes soak through at midnight is still in those clothes in the morning, and the next night, and the one after.

A small body cannot get warm again on its own. It just can’t.

Babies have frozen to death in Gaza. In the last two winters, mothers have woken in tents to find their newborns had died in the night, and the cause was cold. Not a strike. Not hunger. Cold.

That is weeks away from happening again.

We’re already there, and we haven’t stopped.

This year, our team has delivered more than 282,000 meals in Gaza.

I want you to sit with that number, because it isn’t an abstraction. That’s 282,000 times someone was handed something hot by a woman who stayed. Every one of those was a real person, on a real day, who ate because of this list.

A hot meal matters all year. In winter it’s something else entirely. When you’ve slept in wet clothes on wet ground, something warm inside you is the only heat you’re going to get that day.

But the window is now.

Not December, when the rain is already in. Now. While there’s still time to get blankets and warm clothing into tents before the ground turns.

That’s the urgency. Everything we get in before the weather breaks will matter three times as much as the same thing sent after.

So this is me asking plainly, while there’s still time.

Food. Clean water. Formula. Blankets. Warm clothes for children. Delivered by women who never left and are out in those camps today.

And tonight, when you reach for the thing that makes you warm. The jumper, the blanket, the second cup of tea. Notice that you reached for it without thinking.

There’s a mother in Gaza right now watching the sky, working out what she’s going to put between her children and the ground.

Help us get there before the rain does.

282,000 and counting,

Hafsa