Hi everyone,

[aral@mastodon.ar.al]

Hi everyone,

I’ve just launched the Gaza Verified Emergency Appeal to get our remaining 8 families who are stuck in the danger zone in the North to relative safety in the South.

https://gaza-verified.org/emergency/

Based on conversations @joynewacc and I have had with them to ascertain what they need (transport, land, tents), we have set the campaign goal at $15,000.

To kick things off, I’ve made a personal donation of $1,000.

These families are living in terror under nightly bombings by Israel. Please, if you can, help them survive Israel’s ongoing genocide. And please share this as widely as you can.

Thank you!

PS. The donations are being collected by our not-for-profit, Small Technology Foundation and the entire sum, minus Stripe’s fees, will be transferred to the individual fundraisers of the families. We have suspended our own fundraising for Small Technology Foundation for the duration of the emergency appeal (https://small-tech.org/fund-us/).

PS. If you keep the campaign page open, you will see the progress meter update and donations coming in in real time.

#GazaVerified #EmergencyAppeal #GazaVerifiedEmergencyAppeal #Gaza #Palestine #fediAid

[aral@mastodon.ar.al]

🥳 Wow! I wake up and what do I see: We’ve shot past our goal!

As I was sleeping you all managed to get the amount we’ve raised for our families still stuck in the North to $16,095

I have no words: Thank you all so, so much for your support!

I was able to withdraw the equivalent of €7,500 ($8,768.79) of that amount instantly from Stripe today (and can apparently withdraw that much per day from our Stripe account via their instant payments) so we will transfer that amounts to the families most in need today and continue distributing the funds tomorrow.

I’m going to keep the fundraiser running for the moment and we will distribute any additional funds raised to help the other Gaza Verified families, including a couple that were offline and so couldn’t respond to us in time for this campaign who we learned last night are still stuck in the North.

I promised everyone in our Signal group last night that we will leave no family behind and I intend to keep that promise to them.

I’m going to go coordinate with @joynewacc now so we can start payouts and I’ll update you about the status of our families as we go.

Please do keep sharing the campaign so we have as much in the pot as possible to work with.

Thank you all again – you’re doing the fediverse and humanity proud.

#GazaVerified #EmergencyAppeal #GazaVerifiedEmergencyAppeal #Gaza #Palestine #fediAid

[aral@mastodon.ar.al]

Hi everyone, a quick impact report to you at the end of the first 24 hours of our Gaza Verified Emergency Appeal:

https://gaza-verified.org/emergency/

We’ve raised $16,975 out of our original goal of $15,000.

Today, I was able to do an instant withdrawal of €7,500 of that ($8,768.79) from Stripe.

This morning, @joynewacc and I had the difficult task of prioritising today’s payouts from that amount. Our criteria were:

• Who’s most at risk (e.g., in Al-Shifa camp, etc.)?
• How can we help the largest number of our families with what we have on hand today?

As such, I’ve just completed payments to six of our families:

• @baraaelmoghrabi: $2,000 (she in one of the most dangerous places (al-Shifa camp) and this will allow her to move South tomorrow. She will not have enough to rent a tent yet but she said they could stay in a school until we can get the rest of the money to her, which we will as soon as possible.

• @mittall: $2,000 to get a tent in the South (they are homeless right now).

• @shathamohammed123: $1,200 to move to the South.

• @doaagaza: $1,500 to move to the South.

• @bilal_mo: $1,500 to move his family to the South. He still needs $1,500 for a tent but he can house them with relatives for three days. We will get him the rest in time.

• @ghassangaza: $1,200 as she is about to be evicted. She borrowed $2,000 from a lender for a tent. We were able to negotiate with the lender. He will accept $1,200 and the remaining $800 later.

That brings the total we distributed today to $9,400. I covered the difference (~$630) temporarily from our account since time is of the essence.

We will get to everyone else tomorrow when I can withdraw from the Stripe pot again.

I also plan to update the site with the impact reports as we go.

Finally, as we are getting more details from some of the families and the ones we couldn’t contact due to Internet issues on the ground, the current estimate for how much we will need in the immediate future has shot up to $20,000.

So I’ve set the goal to that and we will continue the fundraiser.

Thank you again for your amazing support.

You are making an immediate difference in the lives of our Gaza Verified families.

#GazaVerified #EmergencyAppeal #GazaVerifiedEmergencyAppeal #Gaza #Palestine #fediAid

[aral@mastodon.ar.al]

@joynewacc Thank you all so much, we’ve shot past our $20,000 goal!

https://gaza-verified.org/emergency/

Please keep sharing the campaign and supporting so as we built a pot that all the families can benefit from.

I will be making today’s list of families that we will be distributing funds to, making the payments, and updating you with an impact report for today this afternoon.

You are literally saving lives.

Thank you

#GazaVerified #EmergencyAppeal #GazaVerifiedEmergencyAppeal #Gaza #Palestine #fediAid

[aral@mastodon.ar.al]

@joynewacc Hi everyone, here’s a quick impact report to you at the end of the second 24 hours of our Gaza Verified Emergency Appeal:

https://gaza-verified.org/emergency/

You can find the first day’s report here:
https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/115243292568435455

We’ve raised $21,354.30 out of our revised goal of $20,000.

Thank you all so much for your continued support!

Today, I was able to withdraw another €7,500 from our Stripe account. Yesterday, since I’d temporarily used €547.65 of our own money, I reduced the amount by that much today, giving us €6,952.35. Using our Wise account we were able to convert that to $8,152.03 USD.

We also received a donation in Ethereum from an anonymous donor last night that I was able to convert to ~$600 USD today (there is still ~€60 worth of the ETH from the donation in the Kraken account). Adding this on gave us $8,752.03 to work with.

With that, Joy and I came up with a distribution plan to get funds to those in most need and to the largest number of families possible.

As such, today’s payments went to:

• @ahmedosama: $600 for a tent.

• @doaagaza: $1,000 for a tent (we’d paid for her transportation yesterday; the tent cost was communicated to us later).

• @abeerabed22: $3,000 for transportation South, tent, and land.

• @mittall: $500 for land (we’d paid him for a tent yesterday; the land cost which was communicated to us later).

• @Abdullahawwad: $1,000 for evacuation South. Abdullah needs $2,000 in total to evacuate but PayPal only allowed me to transfer $1,000. This is a daily limit I’ve hit before while trying to donate. I will transfer the remaining $1,000 tomorrow.

• @aseelfromgz: $1,035.51 remaining on amounts raised earlier for evacuation South. (The $35.51 is for PayPal so she gets exactly $1,000. Well, she’ll get ~60% of that when the local money sharks in Gaza take their 40% but we factor this into things.)

• @Salem_family: $1,000.00 for a tent in the South. (I’m trying to keep everything in USD since that’s what everyone uses in Gaza but I had to make this donation in Euros as the Dutch fundraising site steunactie.nl does not offer a USD option. This came out of our own funds in our Euro account so I will be taking that amount out of tomorrow’s Stripe withdrawal. It also means that our USD account, which is solely being used for Gaza Verified donations, still has $605.85 USD in it, which will be used in tomorrow’s distribution.)

• @Dr_Nadeen98: $1,000 to purchase/build sanitation for their place in the South (realised later that commission costs were *not* factored into this so we will find out how much more is necessary and cover it this week, hopefully. Also, Nadeen needs funds this week in order to pay his university tuition so she can graduate as a dentist in a year’s time. I’m waiting for the amount of the tuition so we can hopefully help with that too.)

There are a couple of challenges I’m encountering while making donations and if there are people from these companies on here who can raise the issues internally or get in touch with us to make things easier, I would appreciate it:

1. PayPal: $1,000 daily limit when paying by credit card.

2. GoFundMe will not allow me to pay in USD unless I use my VPN and pretend I’m in the US. Today, one of the pages showed me a 502 Bad Gateway error which I suspect was the US node on my VPN getting flagged. I tried a node in a different city and it worked. I’m worried this might become an issue in the future.

3. Some Chuffed campaigns only accept PayPal. See problem 1.

4. Stripe is working great for us but I can only withdraw €7,500 a day. That said, I’m thankful there’s an instant payout option.

In total, we distributed $9,100 dollars to 8 families today and that will get them three tents, land, sanitation, and one full evacuation (transport, land, and tent). The total number of families we’re helping with this emergency appeal is now more than 8 but I haven’t had time to update the site because of all the other work I have to do. We also have two families we cannot reach at the moment who are in the North and yes, we’re really worried.

I’m going to keep the fundraiser going, so please do share it with your friends and help if you can. It’s a rapidly evolving situation and the more we have in the pot, the better.

Hopefully when we hear back from the two families we can’t reach, I can update the target amount accordingly. Eventually, I hope we can evolve this into an ongoing effort that meets the survival needs of all our Gaza Verified families.

We also had a donor who wishes to remain anonymous and pay by bank transfer begin a transfer for £5,000 today so I will update the amount on the site manually when that comes in (thank you so, so much, dear anonymous donor)

Thank you all again for making this possible and for showing our Palestinian families that you stand with them in their darkest hour.

I am so proud of all of you!

#GazaVerified #EmergencyAppeal #GazaVerifiedEmergencyAppeal #Gaza #Palestine #fediAid

[aral@mastodon.ar.al]

@joynewacc Hi all,

Here’s today’s Gaza Verified Emergency Appeal Impact Report for Day 5:

Today, the $455.50 we had in the USD pot in Stripe that we were waiting for finally got transferred to our bank account.

To add to that, we got a $500 donation via bank transfer.

This morning, I withdrew €951.63 from the Stripe donation pot, clearing it. That got converted to $1,108.09.

Since the amount wasn’t enough for the two payments I wanted to make, I pushed the campaign a bit and you all responded like the absolute gems you are and I managed to withdraw another €794.51 from the pot. From this amount, I took the €200 we’d lent to yesterday’s payments from our own funds, bringing the total to €594.51. This got converted to $691.15.

So the total we had in the USD pot at the end of this was: $455.50 + $500 + $1,108.09 + $691.15 = $2,754.74.

From this, I also deducted the USD amount ($108.41) we had temporarily lent from our own funds yesterday so we could make the payments.

This left us with $2,646.33 to distribute today to:

• @ahmedosama: $600 for land, in addition to the $600 for a tent we had sent earlier.
• @mohshbair: $2,000 for the remainder of transportation, land, and tent so they can evacuate South.

And, with that, we have paid out all the amounts that everyone in our 16 families had told us they needed from the start of the campaign on Saturday.

We currently have $46.33 left in our USD bank account.

I just checked Stripe and with new donations that have come in since my last withdrawal, we have €891.47 in there.

And the state of the campaign in general right now is that we have raised $34,233 out of our revised goal of $35,000 in the last five days and we have distributed $32370.42 to our 16 families to help them escape the bombs in the North to relative safety in the South.

This feels like a milestone.

We added four new families to Gaza Verified today and at least three of them are either trapped in the North or have family that is. I’m asking them for their needs now.

I’m leaving the goal at $35,000 for the moment but, as always, the more we have in the pot, the better we can respond the needs of our families so please keep sharing and helping out if you can.

Once we have the latest list of needs from our new families (and perhaps additional ones from our current ones), Joy and I will come up with a plan for evolving the campaign and the site. I am thinking we might archive the current week and start on a new week, again with singular focus on our families that need the most help in surviving Israel’s genocide in the here and now.

Words cannot express how much I love you all for stepping up and showing your love and solidarity for our families in Gaza and for welcoming them so warmly and with such humanity to the fediverse.

Thank you.

You give me hope.

#GazaVerified #GazaVerifiedEmergencyAppeal #GazaVerifiedEmergencyAppealImpactReport #Gaza #Palestine #fediAid