GoFundMe axed a charity providing tents for displaced Gazans—freezing $250,000 in donations
GoFundMe pulled a fundraiser by Translating Falasteen and The Sameer Project on Tuesday. The Sameer Project delivers critical aid to Palestinian civilians under bombardment by the Israeli Army in Gaza, while Translating Falasteen posts videos translated into English documenting the war.
According to an Instagram post from The Sameer Project, the donations in the GoFundMe pot, which will now be returned to donors, are worth more than $250,000.
Losing that money creates “an absolute disaster for our efforts to exist,” The Sameer Project posted on Instagram in reaction to the news.
Constant bombings by Israel—even in zones specifically designated for civilians where no fighting is supposed to take place—mean there is always a need for more tents. Providing tents is one of the key services of The Sameer Project.
Hala Sabbah, one of The Sameer Project’s co-founders, told the Daily Dot that the effects of losing the money are already being felt.
On Wednesday night, she said the Israeli army bombed the yard of Al-Aqsa hospital—a safe zone where displaced Palestinian people are living in tents. The bombing killed an unknown number of Palestinians seeking shelter and destroyed 21 tents.
“The first people everyone contacts is us, they’re like: we need 21 tents,” Sabbah explained. “I can’t give them 21 tents, because GoFundMe froze our money.”
“It puts me in a really bad position, because we are the emergency response, we are the number one people who get calls when things like this happen. And they happen every two days.”
GoFundMe and other crowdfunding campaigns have been a critical lifeline in getting funds to Gaza as Palestinians face a brutal invasion by Israel, which is being investigated for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.
According to a Time report from March, campaigns on the website have raised $77 million since Oct. 7, 2023, with 12,000 active fundraisers running for Palestine. GoFundMe didn’t respond to questions about the current number of fundraisers on the site or dollar amounts which have been raised since then.
A study from Oregon State University at the end of April found that 56.9% of buildings in Gaza have been destroyed. Tent prices in Gaza soared as Israeli attacks on Palestine intensified and more buildings are destroyed, with asking prices shooting up to between $715 and $930 as of last week.
Before the war, a high-quality tent went for around $50 in Gaza, reported NPR in January.
The reason for the high prices of the tents is a combination of war profiteering and relentless displacement. Sabbah explained that on the days people are displaced, organized groups selling tents on the black market hold them back so her organization can’t buy them in bulk. Commissions and fees also eat up many of the funds—Sabbah said that it costs about 30% of the money to get tents into Gaza alone.
“The majority of people in Gaza have been displaced between 7-10 times,” Sabbah said. “The occupation is constantly changing where the safe zone is, even though they have bombed the safe zones themselves.”
Instead of 21 tents, they were only able to give out four on Thursday.
“Now we’re completely out of tents,” Sabbah explained.
The organization's accounts have been frozen since the end of July, when GoFundMe sent emails out informing them that it would be reviewing the accounts. The Sameer Project also owes money to tent traders now—as it has been without income while its account was under review—preventing the group from buying tents on credit.
And then GoFundMe officially closed their page in a curt email
“Given the complexity and ever-evolving nature of this situation, we must be certain that we are acting in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations. After further review, we will be removing your fundraiser,” an email from GoFundMe posted by the organization reads. “Our Terms of Service, along with strictly enforced policies from the payments industry, prohibit GoFundMe from allowing your fundraiser to continue raising money on our platform for its purpose.”
Sabbah said that GoFundMe shut down the account without any meaningful dialogue. She says she sent over information about how the organization spend the donations, including a detailed spreadsheet showing every transaction for tents and cash aid.
“We’re quite detailed … They asked us for the financial transfers, so I sent them a screenshot of every single bank transfer and a screenshot of every single crypto transfer,” Sabbah said. “We’re very open, we’re very transparent, we are 100% donation based, and I’m from Gaza so for me it’s like ‘what do I have to hide?’ I know who I’m sending the money to.”
The email from GoFundMe says the organization can redirect the funds to the Red Cross, Unicef, or UNRWA. Otherwise, it will refund the money to donors within 3-7 days after being processed. GoFundMe didn’t immediately reply to questions about why the fundraisers were being shut down.
According to Sabbah, the Palestinian-led initiative also received no word from GoFundMe about what laws were broken.
But theirs is not the only Palestinian account that’s been hit. GoFundMe also recently shut down Ibrahim For Gaza, another key mutual aid effort.
“He lost $36,000, he was really frustrated,” Sabbah said. “Then I personally got two refunds for GoFundMes that I had donated to … for the last week, a lot of Palestinian accounts have been closed down … it’s clearly targeting Gaza GoFundMes.”
In the meantime, Sabbah set up another fundraising effort on Chuffed, which she say might be a little more reliable. The site trumpets a message sympathetic to Palestine on the home page, and doesn’t take the 3.9% commission fee which GoFundMe charges. But because she just set the accounts up, the organization not able to get money out of there yet either.
Sabbah says that the mutual aid network she runs is extremely complex—it provides aid in both the North and the South of the country. It also send money and cryptocurrency to many different accounts to get the funds where they are needed.
The project doesn’t just provide tents. It also has initiatives that gives cash aid and medical support to adults and maintains a camp named after the Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer which takes care of 25 extremely vulnerable families, with plans to expand to 60 families.
“We also have an initiative specifically for the North that provides community kitchens, water trucks, and medical points,” Sabbah said. “We go to areas that are quite dangerous and no one reaches, so without our trucks, because two or three neighborhoods our trucks are the only ones that reach there, so if we stop that then we’re actually stopping a lifeline for people.”
Funds for those programs are now also threatened.
“A few left for the next few days, but yeah we’re definitely running out,” Sabbah said.
As for what it would take for GoFundMe to unfreeze the funds, it’s unclear. Sabbah said that the site was never clear with them about what exactly is needed to do to prove the operations are legitimate.
“We send to multiple different people, and we’ve explained that whole thing to GoFundMe. We’re like, we’re operating in a genocide,” Sabbah said. “We’re not sending money to Switzerland … of course I’m not going to have a smooth sailing, clear cut way.”
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