It was 2 in the morning when the strike came. Mariam had just finished nursing her baby daughter, Hana, when the walls of their apartment block in northern Gaza crumbled inward. She doesn't remember how she got out. She remembers the dust. She remembers calling her husband's name into the darkness and hearing nothing back.

She found him twenty minutes later — pinned beneath a slab of concrete in what used to be their kitchen. His leg was broken in two places. He was conscious. He was asking about Hana.

"She's here," Mariam told him, clutching the infant to her chest. "We're here."

This is the story of one family. But it is also the story of tens of thousands of families in Gaza — ordinary people who went to sleep one night in homes they had built over decades and woke up, if they woke up at all, amid ruin.

Over 90% of families in Gaza have been displaced — most of them, multiple times. Each displacement strips away another layer of what it means to have a life: a neighborhood, a school, a vegetable garden, a neighbor who knows your name. By the time Mariam and her husband Tariq reached the shelter in Deir al-Balah, they had been displaced four times in seven months.

A Tent Is Not a Home

The shelter was a patchwork of torn tarpaulins and wooden poles. Twenty-three people shared a space designed for ten. There was no running water. The nearest clean water distribution point was a ninety-minute walk through streets littered with unexploded ordnance.

Hana, now four months old, began to lose weight in the second week. The formula milk Mariam had been rationing ran out. At the health point — a converted classroom staffed by three volunteers working eighteen-hour shifts — a nurse named Rania weighed the baby and wrote a number on a slip of paper. She handed it to Mariam without meeting her eyes.

Severe acute malnutrition.

"I kept looking at that piece of paper," Mariam told me later. "As if the number would change. As if I had read it wrong."

Therapeutic food for malnourished infants — ready-to-use therapeutic food, or RUTF — is available. It costs very little per packet. It can reverse malnutrition in weeks. But getting it past the Israeli blockade and into the hands of families like Mariam's requires a chain of people, logistics, money, and political will that is constantly being broken at one link or another.

That week, aid workers managed to get a consignment through. Hana received her first packet of RUTF on a Tuesday. By the following Friday, she was beginning to gain weight.

The Weight of a Name

Tariq's leg was set in a makeshift cast by a doctor who had been operating without proper anaesthesia for three months. He learned to walk again on a pair of crutches fashioned from scrap metal. He began teaching — informally, under a tarpaulin, a dozen children crowded around a single cracked whiteboard.

"What else am I going to do?" he said to me, not unkindly. "Sit and wait for the world to remember us?"

Every child in that makeshift classroom had lost someone. A parent, a sibling, a grandparent. Tariq didn't make them talk about it. He taught them their times tables. He taught them the names of the planets. He taught them the capitals of countries they had never seen and might never see.

"Knowledge," he told them, "is the one thing no bomb can destroy."

One of his students, a boy named Kareem who was eight years old, told me he wanted to be an astronaut. He said this with complete seriousness. He had drawn a rocket ship on the back of an aid leaflet. Around the rocket, he had drawn small figures — his mother, his father, his sister. All of them were smiling.

What You Can Do

I am not able to tell you that a donation will end this war. I am not able to promise you that the political will exists to stop what is happening. What I can tell you is that your money, translated into food parcels and clean water and therapeutic milk for malnourished infants, reaches real people in real time.

I watched a distribution in Khan Younis in late September. Families lined up before dawn — some had walked hours to be there. An elderly man named Abu Faris received a food parcel and held it against his chest for a long moment before opening it. He looked up at the volunteer handing it to him and said something quietly in Arabic.

The volunteer translated for me later. Abu Faris had said: "This means someone, somewhere, still knows we exist."

They know. You know. And knowing must become something more than knowing.

Mariam's baby Hana is alive. Kareem still dreams of space. Tariq still teaches, under the tarpaulin, on the cracked whiteboard, in a camp that should not exist in a world that calls itself civilised.

The least we can do is make sure they have enough to eat tomorrow.