These days, I've been feeling extra hungry and I genuinely don't know why. But it's been affecting my day-to-day life in ways I didn't expect. My focus is off. My mood dips. I think about food constantly.
And then it hit me: if mild, inconvenient hunger can throw off my entire day, what on earth is happening to the children of Gaza?
I crave something different every day. And every day, I get it. I make it, I order it, I find it somehow. It's just... available to me.
For Gaza's children, it's a different kind of torture. Because they dream about food too. Their stomachs rumble at the thought of it. But when they wake up, there's nothing to cook. No kitchen stocked with options. No way to satisfy that craving, no matter how simple it is. Just some leaves to boil, if they're lucky.
I came across a video this week that's stuck in my head. A small child, malnourished, just skin and bones, crying in his mother's lap. He was telling her he craved potatoes.
Not candy, not a treat. Potatoes.
And his mother, holding back tears she couldn't afford to shed in front of him, said softly: "When God provides, my baby."
She is watching her child disappear in front of her eyes. She has watched him go from healthy, happy, and full of life, to lying on what may well be his deathbed, asking for something as simple as a potato. And she cannot give it to him.
I keep thinking about her. I wonder if she has started to dread his cravings. Not because she doesn't love him, but because every request is a reminder of how powerless she is to save him.
But here's what keeps me going: she doesn't have to be powerless alone.
We are on the ground in Gaza right now. Fully active, uninterrupted, reaching the children who need it most. And when we reach a child like him, we don't hand him a few leaves. We hand him a hot meal. Rice. Chicken. Nourishing food that his body has been starving for. Food that tells him: you are not forgotten.
2nd March 2026 - Gaza Aid Delivery
You can be the one to not only fulfill that child's craving but to nourish him back to life.
You don't have to be in Gaza to save a child in Gaza. You don't have to know his name, or speak his language, or understand the full weight of what his mother is carrying. You just have to decide that his life is worth something and act on it.
And here's what I truly believe: nothing you give is ever lost. There's a concept in Islam that when you give, it comes back to you tenfold, in this world and the next. That no act of kindness, however small, goes unwitnessed or unrewarded. I don't know if you call it faith, karma, or kismet, but I think most of us, deep down, feel that what we put out into the world finds its way back to us. This is one of those moments to put something good out.
Because right now, while you're reading this, he's still hungry. His mother is still holding back tears. And the gap between him and a hot meal is something you can actually close.
This is your moment. Not tomorrow, not after you think about it. Now.
Because for him, there is no later. There is only today, and whether today is the day someone chose to show up for him.
Be that person. Donate today and give a starving child in Gaza not just potatoes, but everything they deserve.
With a full heart and a full plate. Determined to share both,
Hafsa
