Battlefields: Season 1, Episode 5 of My Life as an Ansari / Helper of Gazan Refugees
Bombing at Eid
Here is Season 1, Episode 5 of this article series — the story of my personal experiences and struggles as I became an Ansari (Helper) of Gazan refugees (Muhajireen). List of all episodes can be found here.
June 2024 found me still struggling with getting a handle on my life. I still kept tripping and falling into doom-scrolling, repeatedly getting myself more worked up and more anxious than I already was. Anxiety and its slowly increasing psycho-somatic symptoms became a reality that I learned to live with and worry about in the background, instead of addressing head-on — like someone slowly putting on weight and just living with it, I suppose. My hand would not fully heal, and was stuck in limbo, leaving me unable to lift heavy things and unable to exercise well. I was regularly under-sleeping, not managing my time well, internally beating myself up about it — and my physical health continued to take a toll because of all this.
You wouldn’t know all this from the outside, if you looked at me. These silent battles that we all go through, are often invisible.
I remained clinging to Allah, Alhamdulillah. I prayed to Allah regularly to heal me of my anxiety-induced psycho-somatic symptoms. And I continued having life coaching sessions with my coach/mentor, which was a long-term engagement. Alhamdulillah.
Egyptians For Palestinians set up a Google Form for people to sign up as long-term sponsors of Palestinian refugees — individuals or families — that were stuck in Egypt. You could register your monthly donation amount, for how long, and for what demographics / interests you might prefer to be matched up with. This was essentially an application form, to apply for being an Ansari. And Egyptians For Palestinians would match us up with Muhajireen.
I signed up, apparently mentioning something about preferring to support orphans. For a while, no news came back. But little did I know how much joy this was about to bring into my life.
At the time of writing this post, Egyptians For Palestinians has managed to match up around 60 Palestinian families/individuals with long-term sponsors — and they have many, many more Palestinians in need. Please, please consider donating to their great work using this link. You can also reach out to them with words of support on their Instagram: link. And here is the link to the form, where you can sign up to be an Ansari for Gazan Muhajireen in Egypt.
There are different fronts to this war. By “war”, I am not mis-labelling the ongoing genocide as an equal, two-sided conflict, as opposed to a colonizer mass-murdering native civilians (see here for my article on minding the language war). I mean the broader struggle that the world is waking up to, resisting and hopefully putting an end to the evil ideology of Zionism — the ideology of “we are better than the rest of humanity, we can steal any land we want, and by using parasitizing, lobbying, and shadow politics, we will have our way”. The different fronts of this broader war does include the fully justified physical resistance by Palestinians resisting on the ground, but also includes the global battles of hearts and minds — using various forms of media, at various platforms, in various parts of the world.
Around June, my involvement in the battlefield of Instagram was slowly decreasing, as I focused more on writing these Substack articles, which was more of my forte. My content on Instagram basically reduced down to being posts announcing my latest articles published on Substack. That’s in terms of content production. But in terms of content consumption, I still kept consuming Instagram — rather recklessly, thanks to my weak impulse control (to be honest), as well as their addictive feed algorithms.
And some very interesting battles were going on, on the battlefield of Instagram. In addition to the content creators — awareness posts, life-saving fundraising (by Gazans on the ground), pro-Palestine initiatives broadcasting to their audience, news sharing and narrative countering — the Instagram content consumers themselves were also playing a very interesting role in this battlefield.
My messages with my brother in Gaza were sometimes punctuated by gaps of days at a time. The internet connection at their camp did not seem to be very stable, and once or twice he apologized for delays due to the situation being very difficult on his side — bombing or firing going on around them. I found these gaps in communication to be rather testing for me.
Eid-ul-Adha came around mid-June, the second Eid in this escalated genocide. I gave into my frantic, knee-jerk urge to do something by spending a lot of Eid day fervently writing to churn out this article on donating for Gaza and sharing our Eid with them (the last point in this article is because of my experiences with my brother in Gaza). I acted again with weak impulse control, and went overboard with frantic activism — impacting my health and well-being, and spending rather too much time on this article — only for this article to sort of fall flat once it was published, and hardly gain any traction. It’s the effort and intention that counts with Allah, not social media impressions, but I really needed to get a handle on impulse control.
I didn’t text my brother in Gaza on the day of Eid, as he already hadn’t replied to me since 3 days regarding how things were on his end. It really was a test of my patience. Alhamdulillah in every condition. But the day after Eid, I broke my restraint and texted him. And this time, he did reply, apologizing for the delayed response. The situation had been difficult on his end. He explained to me what he had been through on Eid day.
Being a very popular social media platform, censorship of pro-Palestinian content has been very high on Instagram. (To the astute observer, it seems clear that Israeli lobbies force the US government, which forces social media companies — under the guise of clamping down on terrorism and whatever other label they want to slap on it to make it sound palatable — to comply with their biased, evil censorship against Palestine. Look at what was done against ByteDance / TikTok. The recent crackdown against Telegram clearly seems to be a step in this direction, too.) Pro-Palestine content creators’ accounts are being shadow-banned, their contents’ reach in the algorithm is being snuffed, their posts are being taken down in the name of vague “policy non-compliance”, and comments and posts mentioning keywords like “Palestine” seem to be most impacted.
A critical battle / “game” of cat and mouse has ensued on Instagram for months now. The censorship overlords create certain restrictions, and the pro-Palestinian masses find a workaround. They seem to suppress keywords like “Palestine” and “apartheid”, and Instagram commenters use creative variants like “P @ l3tine” or “Pals” or just the popular watermelon emoji. Palestinians on the ground in Gaza would ask people to like and comment just to boost their posts regarding their fundraisers — a vital lifeline. People would ask each other to watch videos until the end to improve their “algorithm performance”.
Using comments to boost such shadow-banned posts really took off. The social media platforms dampened the reach of pro-Palestinian posts, and Instagram users began using creative strategies in the comment sections. Sometimes they comment with long, copy-pasted sentences about random, totally unrelated subjects like cars — to boost the post without any suspicious keywords. Sometimes people ask others to reply to their comments in response to a random question like “What is your favorite season?” Sometimes people ask others to “water” an emoji plant — reply to the comment with water. Instagram commenters hearken to such calls, understanding the boosting motive behind this, and fill up the comment sections.
While scrolling through Instagram, I would also take part in such tactics left, right, and center. Muslim and non-Muslim alike, we Instagram users became comrades on this battlefield, fighting for justice. We all strived in our own capacities. May Allah guide us all to His Straight Path, and reward us.
My brother in Gaza told me that on the day before, the day of Eid, he and his family had been visiting their relatives (the house of a cousin who had been martyred), when the house next to them was bombed — a place full of residents and children playing in the streets. It was not a battlefield. It was a residential area.
[Mild content warning for the following paragraph: a neighbor being killed is described. You can skip the following paragraph with no major impact on the rest of the article.]
Many people were killed and many were injured, including my brother (though Alhamdulillah his injury didn’t seem to be too serious). My brother found himself lying on the ground. And he saw that an old man — their uncle’s neighbor — who had been sitting on a chair, had been hit in the head with a fragment of the missile. He was no longer in this world.
I was sorry, and expressed my sympathies for what he had gone through. He also told me that the situation was difficult in his camp. I had asked him about the availability of supplies, and he said that they were difficult to get, but Alhamdulillah.
One of the messages I had sent to him earlier had been for us to speak on the phone — we had been texting each other for weeks without having actually spoken to each other. He offered to call me now, while we were texting each other. It was the day after Eid, and I was spending time with my family, so I told him not now, and asked him we could speak that night. He wasn’t sure that he would have internet at night. But we didn’t speak at that time.
That moment … I have thought about that moment many times since. Given things that happened after that time, in the weeks and months to come, Shaitan has tried many times to cause me to regret my decision in that moment. How many times, up until today at the time of writing this, has Shaitan tried to cause me to think: if only. If only I had actually taken his offer for a phone call, when I had had the chance. If only we had spoken that day.
But a Muslim should never think, what if. We put our trust in Allah.
Abu Hurairah said, attributing it to the Prophet (ﷺ): “If something overwhelms you, then say: Qaddarallah, wa ma sha'a fa’al (It is the decree of Allah, and what He wills, He does). And beware of (saying) ‘If only,’ for ‘If only’ opens the door to Satan.” [Sunan Ibn Majah 4168, grade: Sahih]
I tried texting him about an hour later to talk, if he had internet. No answer. That night, I tried again, but still no reply. My brother in Gaza replied about two days later, apologizing about the internet. By the time I got back to his message, my message was not reaching his phone again. Alhamdulillah upon every condition.
Sara Abu Nada is a 20-year-old Gazan, a young nurse in Gaza. She had been pursuing her education before the escalated genocide, and still holds on to completing that dream, In Sha Allah. She and her family of 10 have been displaced multiple times, and some of her family have sustained injuries from bombing. They are surviving dire shortages of food, water, sanitation, and of course, safety. Sara had been volunteering at a hospital to help out. In Rafah, they have faced famine, illnesses, and inhumane living conditions.
Sara reached out to me with her fundraiser link. I also shared with her the link for Relief 4 Palestine (Telegram link and Instagram link; this is the rebranded name for the same, awesome initiative that I’ve mentioned before, GazaDirect2FamilyAid), and explained how to contact admins. It was a short and nice exchange. Later on, her profile in particular stayed in my mind — maybe because I once had neighbors with similar names as hers. Or maybe because she made a memorable video on Instagram, summarizing her story — please check it out: link. Or maybe because she is a promising young medical practitioner.
Please, please consider contributing to her GoFundMe fundraiser: link. Jazakum Allah khair.
An idea occurred to me that could help Egyptians For Palestinians. I happened to have the email address of a founder of a charity aggregation and crowdfunding website. Maybe that founder could point Hafsah in the direction of someone who already had experience in setting up a charity. I could see that what Egyptians For Palestinians was doing seemed to be nascent community building. Surely they could use experienced advice in this regard.
I messaged Hafsah about this, suggesting that this might even help with fundraising. Hafsah welcomed the idea. She told me that currently, fine-tuning their admin and operations was important, given that they now had some fundraising commitments from long-term sponsors / Ansar — I assume these long-term commitments came in from the Google Form they had opened up, for people to register as long-term sponsors. Regarding using the fundraising platform, they were still in the process of registering their charity legally.
I committed to sending that email. I asked Hafsah to have a call with her to better understand their current needs, and to see if I could support somehow, e.g. with crowdfunding efforts, or if I could maybe help through my contacts in Cairo — my day job company has a branch in Cairo. We agreed to have a call sometime during the next few days.
Continued in Season 1, Episode 6: Answer Me. Before you continue, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to support and to stay tuned: