What obstacles do crowdfunding pages face in Palestine’s Gaza?

Khaled Muhammad, a 31-year-old Palestinian man from Khan Younis, is one of many Palestinians who took the painful decision to leave Gaza and seek sanctuary in Egypt amid Israel’s genocidal war on the besieged enclave.

But evacuation is neither easy nor affordable.

For Palestinians to secure unofficial permits to pass through the Rafah border – the sole crossing point out of the occupied territories, large sums of money are paid to so-called ‘travel brokers’.

In Khaled’s case, the asking fee was $5,000 per person – an impossible amount to arrange on his meagre income as a painter in Gaza.

The sole breadwinner supporting a family of five – wife Amira Sabry and their three young children Ella, 4, Amir, 5, and one-year-old Ilan – Khaled had to turn to crowdfunding.

But his initial attempts were met with doubt.

Italian Virginia Santo says Khaled contacted her on Instagram asking for her help raising funds. But at first, she “thought he was a scammer”.

“I didn’t know him, I didn’t trust him. I didn’t have proof of who he was. His Instagram profile was empty, with very few photos, nothing about him, and nothing before Oct. 7th,” Virginia tells TRT World.

Over time, the two began to interact more frequently, hold video calls with Virginia’s Palestinian friend Rola, who translated Arabic and Italian, and begin working together to raise the needed funds.

“I would send his GoFundMe campaign to every profile that had many followers asking to post it and explaining the urgency of evacuating them and the children from the bombs,” Virginia says.

“I was in contact with him every day, and my only objective was to reach the goal of his GoFundMe campaign.”

In April, Khaled’s family fled Gaza and moved to Cairo, Egypt, where they now reside.

But countless other Palestinian families struggle to raise money on crowdfunding platforms as they continue to dodge bombs and bullets in Gaza, where Israel has killed nearly 38,000 people since October last year.

Out of all the crowdfunding campaign websites, GoFundMe has become the most used platform to raise funds for Palestinian families and has seen a major boost in money collected recently.

The campaigns are often launched to not only fund evacuations but also to fund access to vital humanitarian aid in Gaza, such as medicine and food.

This form of aid became especially more important after countries began cutting funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) following Israeli allegations that agency staff were involved in Palestinian resistance group Hamas’ October 7 attack.

However, many crowdfunding websites have both physical and digital restrictions. GoFundMe, for instance, is only available in 19 countries and excludes entire continents like Asia, Africa, and South America.

This forces Palestinians to rely on the help of family, friends or activists abroad to not only create the campaign but also manage its donations.

“Palestinians are forced to rely on people living abroad that sometimes they only met online,” Francesca Salomone, a 22-year-old woman from Rome, tells TRT World.

“The consequence is that, once again, Palestinians are not given independence, not even for their survival,” Salomone says, adding that she created three campaigns from Italy to support Palestinian families.

Creating a campaign is also not easy for those abroad after Western governments introduced sanctions on the Palestinian group Hamas, requiring crowdfunding websites to ask for “additional information” about the causes.

“Thank you for your efforts to help those affected by the crisis unfolding in the Middle East. Due to recent developments within the region, we’re carefully reviewing fundraisers related to this crisis,” an automated email sent to donors typically reads.

“The process to verify the campaign is long and tedious but necessary,” she tells TRT World. “I was asked on multiple occasions to provide information via email and upload some documents using a secure link.

‘Extra red tape’

In one instance, Salomone joined Kodi, a woman from New York on the campaign she created for the Al Bardini family in Deir Al Balah.

“We had a lot of issues. The compliance team from GoFundMe kept asking for additional information without giving us a chance to send it to them. They ignored our emails for several days and even gave us an expired link to upload a member of the family’s ID.”

“The family’s situation is complicated because Remas, the youngest, is paralysed and needs constant care and expensive medicine. Despite that, her brother Ahmad is always helping other displaced people and members of his extended family.”

While this was Salomone’s first fundraising, she says she is unsure if campaigning for other parts of the world is different.

“But what Kodi and I noticed is that we received completely different treatments when creating a campaign from Italy vs the US,” she says.

In fact, many people who have run GoFundMe campaigns for other causes told The Verge that they never encountered “this extra red tape” in their other campaigns worldwide.

Some have also alleged that while their fundraises were placed under review by GoFundMe, the campaigns continued to be open to donation, despite the platform normally turning off this feature.

Professor Aaron Martin at the University of Virginia – an expert in humanitarian organisations and tech policy – told the Verge that “GoFundMe is likely running names against lists of sanctioned individuals and groups” on government-run lists.

But he warned these lists are often incomplete and inaccurate. And overall, these extra and confusing processes have slowed urgent aid efforts and put off donors.

Next hurdle: receiving aid

If money has been raised on the platforms, then it's another hurdle trying to transfer it to Palestinians in need, as many banking systems and companies do not provide services to people in Gaza or the occupied West Bank.

Nura Nipote, a 42-year-old Canadian who actively raises awareness and funds for Palestinians in Gaza, tells TRT World that they mostly use PayPal for the transfers.

“We often use PayPal for short fundraisers with more ‘reachable’ objectives and to collect less money. For example, ‘500 euros for X gallons of water in so and so village’,” she says.

“So we reach the goal. Close the fundraiser and move on to the next objective. PayPal is set up in such a way that makes these "flash" fundraisers easy to set up and conclude,” she adds.

However, PayPal itself has restrictions in place, and in 2021, it was accused of delaying payments that included phrases such as “Palestinian emergency relief fund” and “emergency Palestinian relief fund.”

More recently, The New Arab reported increasing disruptions against Gaza fundraisers “by networks of Israeli trolls” and “heavy-handed moderation from PayPal.”

In one case, several organisers were running a campaign to help their friend in Gaza evacuate to Egypt. Suddenly, they received a spree of donations from Israeli locations that were abruptly cancelled.

Shannon tells the New Arab that she believes her page was “attacked by pro-Israel trolls who were trying to get her Stripe account frozen by reporting their transactions.”

“Or maybe they were just trying to mess with us and our emotions as, for many fundraising platforms, the donations are only released to the campaigners once their goal is achieved. So, it’s possible they wanted to toy with our hopes,” she says.

Organisers like Nipote, daughter of a Palestinian-Italian mother and Egyptian father, and her friends continue to try to navigate these hurdles, even by switching to new platforms, such as GoGetFunding, as it is open to other countries.

However, the challenges in fundraising continue.

Meanwhile, as Khaled and his family try to piece together their new lives in Egypt, he reflects on his 72-year-old mother and 67-year-old father, who remain in Gaza.

“Before I left the tent where we were living, I said goodbye to all my family and I said goodbye to the neighbours in the tents around us,” he tells TRT World.

“When I first stepped out of the camp, I honestly cried. Separation is difficult. May God get us together soon. ”