A Mother Holding On: Hayam Ibrahim Alqarra’s Daily Fight to Feed Her Children in Gaza

There is a mother in Gaza trying to keep her children alive, and her name is Hayam lbrahim Alqarra. She is twenty‑four years old, a mother of two from Bani Suhaila in Khan Younis, and she has been displaced since the third day of the war. Her home is gone. Her neighborhood is gone. What remains is her determination to keep her children alive in a place where survival has become a daily negotiation.

Hayam lives now in a tent. The word tent feels too small for what it has to hold. There is no electricity. No clean water. No gas. No safety. Her husband carries shrapnel in his chest from Israel’s airstrikes. The fragments are still inside him. He cannot work. Their three‑year‑old daughter cries from hunger. Their baby needs milk. Every day is a new version of the same struggle.

Yesterday, Israel bombed across Gaza again. More than thirty‑one people were killed in a single day. The bombs fall, but so does everything else. Israel starves Palestinians. It deprives them of water. It leaves them freezing in winter storms.

When the last storm hit, the rain poured straight into their tent. The ground turned to mud beneath their feet. Water soaked their blankets, their clothes, their food. The tent flooded so badly that Hayam had to lift her children off the ground to keep them dry. There was no way to stay warm. No way to stay clean. No way to stay safe.

And still, she tries to feed them.

In one of her past posts, she wrote something that stays with you long after you read it.

“Thank God, I finally got a plate of rice for my daughter after waiting three hours in line at the soup kitchen. This is our lunch today. Please contribute and donate so I can provide food for my daughter.”

A plate of rice. Three hours in line. A mother thanking God for what most of us would consider the bare minimum. This is the scale of life in Gaza now. This is what survival looks like.

Her daughter asked to eat meat this Friday. A simple request from a child who does not understand siege or starvation. Her father is too injured to provide it. Hayam is left with the impossible task of explaining hunger to a child who only knows that she is hungry.

This is why she is asking for help. Not for comfort. Not for luxury. For food. For water. For milk. For a gas cylinder that now costs four hundred dollars. For a safer shelter. For medical care for her husband. For the bare minimum that allows a family to stay alive.

Her fundraiser is here:

https://chuffed.org/project/hayamibrahim

Every donation matters. Truly. Even a few dollars can mean a meal or a blanket or a moment of relief. And if you cannot donate, every share and every comment helps more than you might think. Visibility is a lifeline. Attention is a form of protection. Solidarity is a form of resistance.

If you want to reach out to her directly, she is on Twitter at @hyamalqra494. She answers messages herself, from the same tent that floods when the storms come and where she tries to shield her children from the cold.

Israel is still bombing Gaza. The world cannot stop the bombs, but it can refuse to let families starve. It can refuse to let children freeze. It can refuse to look away.

Hayam’s daughter with her friends

Standing with Gaza means standing with mothers like Hayam. It means refusing to let her story disappear into the noise of war. It means helping her feed her daughter tomorrow.

Her hope rests in the hands of strangers who choose to care.