Friends, I Need You to Hear This Mother’s Plea for a Tent

There are moments when someone’s suffering reaches you in a way that feels personal, even if you have never met them. That is what happened when friends of Om Abdullah began sharing her story. They speak of her not as a distant figure in Gaza, but as a mother whose voice carries the kind of fear and exhaustion any parent would recognize. They speak of her as someone who has been holding her family together with nothing but willpower.

What she lives in cannot even be called a tent. There are no poles, no structure, no walls meant to keep out cold or rain. It is only a patchwork of tarps, scraps of cloth and whatever pieces of material she and her children have been able to gather. These pieces are tied together loosely, sagging and shifting with every gust of wind. Rain pours through. Cold air cuts straight in. At night, the fabric moves like a curtain, not a shelter.

There is no protection in this space. No warmth. No privacy. No safety. Her children sleep exposed to the winter air, and every night she fears the cold will take more from them than she can replace.

She has many needs. Clean water. Food. Winter clothing. Bedding. Firewood. Medical and dental care. The list is long because everything has been stripped away. But right now, above all else, she is begging for one thing. A real tent. A tent that stands. A tent that closes. A tent that can keep her children alive through the winter.

Her friends say she is exhausted from pleading. They say she has reached the point where every request feels like humiliation, yet she keeps asking because her children have no one else. She has fed them only by sacrificing her pride. She has protected them only by enduring indignities no mother should ever face.

A proper tent costs six hundred dollars. It is the one thing she cannot afford and the one thing she cannot survive without. She is not asking for comfort. She is asking for shelter. She is asking for the bare minimum any child deserves.

For anyone who wants to help her directly, donations can be made through her campaign at chuffed.org/project/omabdullah. For those who want to speak with her or offer support personally, she can be reached through her Twitter account at @BelalDawoo12613.

And if you cannot donate, please know that you can still help her. A share is powerful. A comment is powerful. Engagement pushes this story into more hands and more hearts. Every time someone shares this article, it reaches someone who might be able to give what she needs. Please take a moment to share it, to comment, to help it travel farther than any of us can reach alone.

Her friends are asking you to hear her. To see her. To understand that this is a mother trying to keep her children alive in the cold. A tent is all she is pleading for right now. A tent is what stands between her family and another night of freezing air.

If you can help in any way, it will mean everything to her.