Dear Friends and Supporters,

I write to you with shaking hands and a broken spirit. Gaza has become a wasteland of starvation where parents watch their children wither away day by day. This is not hyperbole—it is genocide by famine.

Last week, my friend—an educated engineer, a mother of seven—called me screaming. She hadn’t eaten in five days. Her children were chewing on leaves. “I’ll sell my organs for a sack of flour,” she wept. That flour now costs $600 on the black market—when you can find it.

My siblings, their bodies weakened by months of hunger, recently walked 12 miles to a UN food distribution point. They returned with empty hands and broken souls. What they witnessed there will haunt me forever: elderly people collapsing in line, infants sucking on empty bottles, aid workers crying as they turned thousands away.

Yesterday, my brother risked his life to grab 3 kilos of moldy flour from a looted truck. This is what “success” looks like now.

The Math of Our Suffering:

• 1 sack of flour (2 weeks of survival): $500-600
• 1 kilo of rotten vegetables: $15-20
• 1 liter of dirty water: $10

If you prefer donating to organizations, I understand. But know this: Thousands of food trucks sit rotting at the Rafah crossing—their contents expiring in the sun or freezing rain while bureaucrats debate. The system is broken. My appeal is direct: Help reaches my family TODAY, and we share with every starving neighbor at our door.

I Beg You:

1. Donate directly – Every dollar buys minutes of life
2. Share this wildly – Your network could be our miracle
3. Don’t wait – By tomorrow, another child will be gone

We’ve run out of metaphors. Out of tears. Soon we’ll run out of time. Your humanity is our only hope.

With the last of my strength,
Fida Qishta

https://gofund.me/40e91d29

Where Should The Birds Fly – Mona’s Story by Fida Qishta

Oct 7, 2010
In December of 2008 Israel launched a devastating attack on Gaza. A month of bullets, bombs, rockets white phosphorus, tanks and bulldozers left 1400, mostly civilians, dead and this section of Occupied Palestine in rubble.

But this is not a story of misery amongst the rubble. It is the compelling and moving story of two remarkable young women, the future of Palestine, who personify the struggle to maintain humanity, humor and hope, to find some degree of normality in the brutal abnormality that has been imposed on them.

Mona is an 11 yr old girl of remarkable wisdom. Her family died under Israeli rockets. Fida Qishta, the filmmaker, is a 27 year old journalist. With her crew she has documented the lives of the people of Gaza.

This is a Palestinian film, the first made by Palestinians. But it is a story that resonates across the bitter history of man’s inhumanity to man: in the oil soaked poverty of the Niger Delta, in the destroyed state of Iraq, in the fierce resistance of the Warsaw Ghetto.

DEMOCRACY NOW! NOVEMBER 20, 2012

Fida Qishta is interviewed during the 2012 Israeli attacks on Gaza.