FAQ (En)
We're asking for your support to help our friend and his family survive the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Our friend Ibrahim is responsible for supporting 26 extended family members, including elders, children, a disabled adult, and a baby. We are a group of friends in Berlin (and some other territories) doing our best to help our friend shoulder this immense responsibility. Since the summer of 2024, we have been fundraising to cover all of Ibrahim’s family’s daily living costs.
In April of 2026, we launched a successful fundraising campaign to raise enough money to enable Ibrahim to start a grocery store in his old neighbourhood of Al-Nasr in Gaza city. At the beginning of September, 2026, Ibrahim was able to officially open the shop (you can follow for updates about it at https://social.anartist.org/@ibrahimfriends/ on mastondon or @grocery_gaza on Instagram). We are continuing to support Ibrahim and his family with their daily needs as the shop gets running, but will be transitioning to a wider community support model after that. Read on for more!
If you'd like to be more involved, please reach out. We can't do this ongoing work without our community, and we would love to invite you to be a part of it.
Updated October/2026
Who is Ibrahim?
Ibrahim is a 27 year old tourism manager originally from Gaza city, currently displaced with his family in Dier al Balah. Ibrahim got married in the summer of 2025, and is a new father to a baby girl. In addition to his wife and daughter, Ibrahim is solely responsible for supporting his extended family of 26 people, including elders, children, and a disabled adult.
Ibrahim is an extremely generous and community minded person. In the past, when we were able to send more funds than the amount he needed to meet the daily needs of his immediate family group, Ibrahim arranged aid distribution actions for his neighbours. Over the summer of 2025, he delivered tents, food, water, milk and diapers where they were most needed. It is Ibrahim’s goal that his new grocery store becomes not only a source of sustainable income for his own family, but a means of ongoing support and solidarity for the whole neighbourhood.
Who are we?
We are a group of private individuals with no affiliations or support from NGO’s, charities, grant funding, or other sources of income beyond what we can raise through our own grassroots efforts. Our fundraising group is entirely volunteer, based around Europe and North America, and we send 100% of your donation directly to Ibrahim and other Gazans in need. We are in daily communication with Ibrahim to try our best to meet the family's needs.
Despite our limited financial means, the people behind this initiative have been pooling our resources for over two years to support Ibrahim and his family on a monthly basis through a sustained fundraising campaign and the launch of various fundraising initiatives. Some of us have been part of social economy networks, others contribute through artistic production, event organization, or outreach on social media. We all share a strong commitment to Palestinian liberation, solidarity and mutual aid.
What can I do to help?
We are a small group of precariously employed and low income people, and we are not able to cover the financial costs of this work alone. We appreciate every offer of support! Talk to your people about this campaign. Make concrete requests of your friends and family. Everyone who contributes in even the smallest way to this work helps us keep going, and every donor that you can help us recruit - especially if you can sign folks up for recurring donations* - helps us immensely. We regularly organize different types of fundraising events in Berlin that you can support with whatever your availability allows.
you can be updated via Mastodon or Instagram and sign up if you can collaborate or even make and event yourself
*this is an option on our Chuffed Euro account, ask if you need help setting it up
You can support Ibrahim and his community by picking up one of our “Buy Groceries in Gaza” risoprint postcards.
The postcards allow you to "buy groceries in Gaza", with the price of the cards reflecting the current price of the illustrated item in Gaza. You can find them at the following local businesses:
Berlin:
Casino for Social Medicine
Let it Bleed
Zabriskie Buchladen
Other Nature
Bleed Print
Bartleby&Co
Madrid:
- Comming soon.
How much do you need to raise?
As you probably have heard, the price of goods in Gaza has greatly increased over the last three years. Although grocery prices have come down from the extremes reached in the summer of 2025, the majority of the population still has no source of income to be able to pay for groceries. Many people rely entirely on donations for all of their daily needs, making even staple supplies out of reach.
Currently, to feed Ibrahim’s family of 27 people an extremely basic diet costs €100/day. In addition to €1200 for monthly rent, this means supporting his family costs at least €5000/month. For the past two years, our fundraising group has been the sole source of income for the family, covering these costs entirely through grassroots fundraising efforts.
Now that Ibrahim’s grocery store has started running and will provide the family with a source of income, we will be transitioning away from sending Ibrahim’s family direct donations, and towards helping him support those most in need in his community through the grocery shop. We will continue to collect donations for a community food bank program, run through Ibrahim’s store. This both supports Ibrahim’s family, and those in his neighbourhood with less access to resources.
How does the food bank program work?
Every month, we send Ibrahim what we have collected which he can put towards the bills of people who would like to buy groceries at his shop, but can’t afford to. People in the neighbourhood can ask to have their groceries paid for out of this donation ‘bank’ account, both providing the neighbours who have less access to resources with free groceries which they can pick out, and Ibrahim with the profit margin of the goods and a guaranteed source of ongoing income to plan with.
I heard aid is entering the Gaza strip again since the ceasefire. Why do people have to buy food at all, can't they get humanitarian aid for free now?
Since the so-called 'ceasefire' went into effect on October 10, 2025, the occupation has allowed some limited aid to enter Gaza again. This aid is currently many times less than what is required to feed the population, and also much less than the terms set out by the ceasefire agreement. According to UN experts, "The volume of aid trucks entering Gaza has never reached the agreed target of 600 per day and has frequently fallen below half that number". It is also important to remember that this trickle of aid follows a complete blockade of all goods which was in effect for the previous eight months. This means the food aid available is insufficient to cover everyone's needs, leaving many hungry. There are some community food kitchens operating, but there is not nearly enough to meet the extreme need.
Access to food also varies greatly depending on where exactly you are in Gaza. In Deir al Balah, there is food available to buy and prices have come down in comparison to previous months, but it remains much more expensive than usual and the basics are still out of reach for many Gazans. The best option is still to donate directly to families like Ibrahim's, who can then buy their own groceries according to their needs.
If there isn’t enough food getting in, how did you manage to start a grocery store?
While there is not enough high quality nutritious food available in general (which has been the case even for years prior to October 2023: see this article from 2014 for a discussion of how Gazans are intentionally “put on a diet” by the occupation), there is limited food available if you can pay for it. There are customers able to buy from Ibrahim's shop, but food shortages continue to be a major issue.
All border crossings in to Gaza are strictly controlled by the occupation, which may arbitrarily fully close the borders for days or weeks at a time. At the time of this writing (mid October, 2026), the border has been closed for a week, causing serious food shortages in the markets. Small shopkeepers like Ibrahim do not have a special way to access food supplies, they must buy whatever the occupation allows in through local bulk distributor markets, facing the same shortages and rising prices as the rest of the population. Ibrahim does his best to stock basic food items like rice, flour, pasta, lentils, beans, oil, and canned food, but availability changes constantly, and at the moment even these products are becoming harder to find.
Currently, most Gazans are reliant on donations or remittances from family outside of Gaza, and so often cannot afford to pay for food, forcing them to rely on free community food kitchens. Community kitchens are vastly under resourced and cannot meet the extreme demand, which means many people go hungry.
Ok, but then why start a grocery store rather than a community food kitchen that helps the people who can’t afford to buy groceries?
As a small grassroots mutual aid group, we know both the value of autonomy and the limits of our own resources and capabilities. Ibrahim’s idea to start a grocery store began with the pain and anger he felt seeing shop merchants inflate prices and price gouge while his family and their neighbours were struggling to pay for the most basic essentials. His idea was to have a business that was not just interested in making as much money as possible, but that would also act as a hub of community support; keeping prices as low as possible, and donating groceries when he could. The grocery store provides not only a reliable source of income for his own family, but also a measure of the autonomy and agency stolen from him by the occupation, which destroyed his previous business.
As a group, we understood that we are not able to maintain the level of support the family needed. Every month we struggled to raise enough for Ibrahim’s family alone, as we saw the donations become less and less over time. Rather than leave our friend without any alternative means of support as donations dry up, we decided to work together to make a project that would give him a chance to support himself in a dignified and independent way.
As the new grocery shop starts to make a profit and provide Ibrahim’s family with a consistent means of income, we are working on transitioning our fundraising efforts away from direct support of his family, and towards subsidizing the shop through the community food bank program, so that his neighbours who might not be able to afford groceries can shop with him for free.
Wouldn't it be better to donate to large organizations rather than individual families?
We would like to challenge those giving to question why it is they might feel more comfortable donating to large organizations with name recognition, without intimate knowledge of how that money is actually spent, or personal involvement beyond a one time transaction. While there are some reputable and Gazan lead initiatives operating on the ground, we believe it is most important to put money directly into the hands of those in Gaza struggling to survive this genocide, as they are the ones who know their needs the best. In this way you can be certain that the highest percentage of your donation possible goes directly to keeping people alive, not to international staff salaries, infrastructure overheads, government lobbying or inflated marketing campaigns.
Why are you still asking for donations when on the Chuffed account it shows that you have surpassed the goal already?
The Chuffed account shows the total turnover of the campaign since it was created, not the current account balance. This means you can't tell by looking at the public Chuffed page how much is actually in the account. We transfer money from this account to Ibrahim daily, so if we are asking for donations, it means there is no money currently in the account.
People are really paying rent during a genocide?
Yes. While many are living in tents, Ibrahim's family is lucky to still have access to an apartment in Dier al Balah, which they rent from a landlord. The apartment is located in one of the evacuation red zones, but the family feels it is still safer than moving to tents in one of the so-called "safe zones", which have also been bombed by the occupation. They have a relatively good relationship with the landlord, who is renting them the apartment at below market rate. The landlord is also Gazan and uses this income to support his family as well.
How does the money get to Gaza?
We are sending all donations directly to Ibrahim via crypto transfer (USDC). We convert the donations to USDC and transfer them to Ibrahim's crypto wallet. He then goes to a trading desk or merchant near him who will buy cryptocurrency and exchanges it for cash. For this service, the merchant currently charges around 5% commission (this rate fluctuates and has gone as high as 50% over the last two years). On our end, we have tried to develop a system that saves as much on transaction fees as possible, but we cannot change the commission rate being charged in Gaza; this is a fixed commission when withdrawing cash, regardless of the method of money transfer.
The advantage of using crypto is that we can transfer money immediately, and there are more points of access to make the exchange rather than searching for an operating bank branch. Bank transfers can come with additional risks to access the funds, take a very long time, and also have the same commission rate.
I heard crypto is bad/I disagree ideologically with using crypto.
We are using cryptocurrency as a tool to circumvent more dangerous and slower methods of money transfer. Using this method of transfer allows us to avoid the risk of governments or companies freezing bank accounts (there have been many issues sending money to Gaza from German bank accounts, for example). Sending money this way was a request from Ibrahim. We trust those bearing the heaviest weight of this genocide to know what is best for them.
Detailed info in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Px9ohL06jrc
Is there somewhere I can verify this campaign for myself? Like an Instagram account or see videos of Ibrahim and his family?
In order for the grocery store fundraising campaign to be approved by the Goteo crowdfunding platform, both Ibrahim and the fundraising team went through an extensive vetting process. Both the Mastodon and Instagram page are run by us, and includes updates Ibrahim sends us about the shop. Ibrahim also has his own Instagram page where he has documented his previous aid distribution actions, @pulses_of_mercy, although it isn’t very active now.
If you like, you are also welcome to join one of our two Telegram channels where Ibrahim shares updates and sometimes photos when he wants to. In general though, we would like to push back against the expectation that Gazans must share the intimate details of their lives and their suffering in order to be believable and earn donations from a sympathetic audience.
But then how do I know this isn't a scam?
Ibrahim is a personal contact of one of the members of our Berlin-based fundraising group. We are working to build a network of supporters for his family through our own local mutual aid networks and associated networks of trust which have existed for years prior. As such, this is not only a request for your donation, it is equally an invitation to be part of the larger work of building interconnected communities of support and solidarity. Come meet us and get involved.
Join the telegram channel for organizers: https://t.me/c/2296589862/1