Help the Shaban Family Evacuate Gaza

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United Kingdom

Hi All,

We’re starting up a renewed fundraising effort so that some friends of ours can evacuate from the Gaza Strip into the relative safety of Egypt.

Since Spring 2024, we’ve been in constant contact with Ahmed Shaban, a former personal trainer from Rafah, Gaza. He, his wife Laila and their four children (Amir, 8; Lana, 13; Malik, 15; Jana, 17), are displaced and living in an overcrowded camp in Mawasi Khan Younis.

For a year and a half, the family have lived without the basic necessities of human life, exposed to the elements and exhausted. The constant buzz and roar of drones and military aircraft has left them chronically sleep deprived and anxious, and all of them are suffering from malnutrition. Their generally weakened, worn down physical state – along with Israel’s extensive destruction of Gaza’s health and sanitation infrastructure – means that they’re also frequently getting sick. Hepatitis, respiratory infections, and scabies are all rife in the camp, and their living conditions make both prevention and recovery very difficult.

As you can imagine, the Shabans have also endured extreme trauma. They’ve lost family members, friends, and neighbours; they’ve been shot at, bombed and harassed; their home city has been reduced to rubble and is strewn with human remains.

We desperately need to get Ahmed, Leila and the kids out of the Strip. The crossing into Egypt has been reopened under the ceasefire deal, and given the situation’s volatility we are keen to get their evacuation booked as soon as humanly possible.

They’ll be a group of 8: Ahmed, Laila and the kids, along with Laila’s sister and her daughter. Travel and border fees are approximately £5,000 per adult, £3,500 per child, so it’ll be £40,000 total to account for transaction fees, price gouging at the border, and their immediate needs after evacuation.

Otherwise, any funds not spent on evacuation will go towards the family’s daily needs: Food, water, medical care, shelter.

You may have seen us raise money for Ahmed and co before: He previously had a GoFundMe, but he’s had a lot of problems with that platform and is at present unable to access the few funds that remain in his account. For months he’s been using transfers through his brother-in-law’s Paypal to cover daily costs, but for obvious reasons that is not a good long-term arrangement.

As a more transparent and organised solution, we created this Chuffed campaign. Unlike previous efforts, we will be managing the campaign on the family’s behalf – their internet access is increasingly patchy, and the less admin they have to deal with, the better.

Any donation, large or small, will be profoundly appreciated. This family has had to endure so much.

Unfortunately it’s been another harrowing couple of weeks for Ahmed and family. They are once again grieving the loss of two long-time family friends, and while wracked with grief, they are also enduring the despair of Israel’s continued blockade on the Gaza Strip.

Daily massacres at the US and Israeli-backed “aid distribution sites” have been met with little more than a shrug from the international community. After a couple of failed attempts at accessing food through these death traps, Ahmed and family made the decision to avoid them entirely – which unfortunately means paying the outrageous prices offered by market vendors and bandits who loot aid. So far, around €30,000 of the 60k evacuation fund we raised has been eaten up by food, medical care, and other living costs.

The family would deeply appreciate any donations you could make to replenish what’s been lost – but above all we need the blockade to be lifted. Please write to your local political representative and demand to know what they’re doing to right this generational wrong. Take part in protests. Demand justice.

A word on the people that Ahmed, Leila and co have lost recently. (I haven’t named them to protect the family’s safety):

The first was a school friend of Ahmed and his wife, Leila. A trained counselor coordinating psychosocial support for displaced children, he was murdered along with two of his young children by an Israeli strike on his tent in Mawasi. His employers, in a moving tribute, described him as a “deeply compassionate professional who brought joy, healing and hope to thousands of children and families”. He is survived by his wife, who is recovering in hospital, and his daughter Leila, named after Ahmed’s wife.

The second was a young man who trained with Ahmed when he was a personal trainer in Rafah. At only 22 years old, he had already lost most of his family during the course of the war. Finally, bombs took his life too.

Both of these bereavements, which happened only days apart, have devastated the family – and these are just two in a long list of losses over the past two years. Recently Ahmed noted that of all the guys that used to train with him at the gym, only 2 are still alive – and one of them is now disabled for life, after his legs were badly injured in a bombing. The family would appreciate your prayers, both for their safety and the souls of their murdered loved ones.

Hi friends.

As you may be aware, conditions on the ground in Gaza have worsened unimaginably over the past week. Israel’s continued refusal to allow food and humanitarian aid into the Strip (save for a pitiful trickle, nowhere close to enough for the millions trapped there) means that starvation is rampant. Residents of Khan Younis, a city near where Ahmed and family are camped, is once again under a forced evacuation order, which means that the displacement camp is unbearably overcrowded. The Shabans are living on a few pieces of flatbread per day, and each trip out to get flour is long, exhausting and traumatic.

Ahmed says that it feels apocalyptic: People with nothing sit weeping in the street with their children, explosions rain down constantly and shake the ground, the sound of aircraft at night is worse than it’s ever been. Members of Leila’s extended family lost their tent to a bombing a f