Help Get a Journalist Out of Gaza

Please give what you can to help Mohammed Mhawish and his family.

Mohammed, his wife Asmaa, and their son Rafik.

I don’t usually use this platform for personal reasons, but I’m breaking that convention today to ask you all to help get Mohammed Mhawish, a journalist in Gaza who has written for me many times over the past six months, the money he and his family need to make it across the border into Egypt.

You can click the button below to donate to the fundraiser that we’ve set up for Mohammed and his relatives.

Mohammed is 25 years old. He has a two-and-a-half-year-old son, and his wife is pregnant with their second child. For the last six months, he and his family have been trapped in north Gaza, the epicenter of Israel’s assault. They have endured calamity after calamity. A few months ago, Israel bombed the house where Mohammed and his family were staying. The house collapsed on top of them. Everyone was buried under the rubble for hours. Miraculously, they survived—only to find themselves falling prey to the famine that Israel is engineering in Gaza. They have all been diagnosed with malnutrition. They are all nursing injuries they have no way of getting help to heal.

Through all of that, Mohammed has kept writing and reporting, including for The Nation, my other professional home. He has risked his life over and over again to tell the story of what is happening to him and everyone else in Gaza.

Journalists are one of the most targeted groups in Gaza. Israel has killed them at a higher and faster rate than anything seen in the history of the modern world. Mohammed’s life has been personally threatened by the Israeli military.

Now, Mohammed is trying to get out, along with his wife, his son, his parents, and his sister. They need to make the dangerous trip from the north of Gaza to the south, and then get across into Egypt. And for that, they need money. It costs thousands of dollars per person just to make it over the border.

I am painfully aware that millions of people in Gaza don’t have American journalists with resources and connections in their corner, and that crowdfunding for individual families to get out is not any real kind of solution to the catastrophe there. These are the kinds of zero-sum nightmares our unjust world forces upon us.

All I can say is this: Mohammed has been living through absolute hell for the past six months. He has been blown up, starved, lost his home, lost his possessions, lost his country. He has watched his young child cry himself to sleep with hunger, watched his wife endure pregnancy, watched his parents get sicker and sicker. He has been put through physical and psychological trauma that will leave lifelong scars.

Yet he has still written for me, and for others. He has worked through pain and misery and terror for me. He has put his life on the line so I have a story to publish. That sort of selflessness is not something I can really reciprocate. But I can raise some money, so that’s what I’m doing, along with a bunch of Mohammed’s other friends and supporters.

It would mean the world to me if you could assist even a little bit in that effort. Please click the button and give what you can.

And thank you.

Update, 2:07 p.m. ET: A ton of you have donated already. There’s so much goodness in the world. Thank you for being part of that goodness. Please share this post so that we can get Mohammed and his family as much money as possible to rebuild their lives from scratch.