When Yazan, who is Palestinian and lives in Gaza, and Alla, an activist in the United States, were first introduced through a mutual connection online soon after the events of October 7, 2023, they hit it off straight away. They’ve never met in person, but the pair, who declined to share their full names for safety reasons, describe each other as being best friends, even like brother and sister. Though Alla says she may seem like Yazan’s political mentor, they “learn from each other equally”: she brings ideas about liberation and organizing to Yazan, and then sits back to let him do the talking.
Yazan and Alla share an interest in mutual aid, an organizing principle that prioritizes collaboration and close community ties without an expectation of equal exchange. Unlike traditional charity or donation drives, mutual aid goes beyond one-sided “help” or raising funds, instead focusing on voluntary association and sharing of resources. To Yazan, who lives with his family in a tent encampment, mutual aid has a lot in common with zakat an Islamic concept which promotes community solidarity as an act of worship. The pair believe deeply in their vision of mutual aid: solidarity, equity, and, as Alla says, “collective care, not survival of the fittest.”
Collective care is critical to survival in Gaza, where lack of access to food, drinkable water, medicine, and adequate shelter have made daily survival a constant struggle for Palestinians there. More than two years into Israel’s genocidal war, it’s become difficult to access funds in Gaza. Online donations often need to be transferred twice, from online platforms such as Chuffed or GoFundMe, to a bank account, and then to a wire transfer service.
What’s more, online crowdfunding platforms have been inconsistent in their handling of fundraisers for people in Gaza. Larger platforms such as GoFundMe have been accused of blocking donations and imposing unfair restrictions on Palestinian fundraisers, including a special review process for GoFundMe projects related to what it calls “the conflict in the Middle East.”
And although a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was announced in October, Yazan says the conditions he and others in his community face have not changed. In the first few weeks of the ceasefire, Israel said it would only accept half of the 600 daily aid trucks it’d agreed to allow into Gaza under the deal. But it has refused to fully reopen the border crossing in Rafah, defying the terms of the agreement by blocking more aid from reaching Palestinians in Gaza. Since the ceasefire agreement took effect, Israel has killed roughly 400 people, and has been accused of hundreds of direct ceasefire violations.
Amid these conditions, Yazan and Alla created a mutual aid collective called Bridge of Solidarity, rooted in their shared mutual aid principles. Since its founding in the summer of 2025, the project has amassed a large following on social media, and raised more than $200,000 in donations for Palestinian communities in Gaza from contributors online.
Yazan says he was led to take action as a result of his frustration with charity and aid groups. “I felt an overwhelming need to create an organization that was based on privacy, dignity, and respect, where all of the money goes directly to the people,” Yazan says. “So many aid organizations here force people to show their crying faces or uncomfortable or sad faces on camera without dignity, while they pose with a photo of their logo so that Westerners keep donating to them.”
The circumstances in Gaza have led to the rise of what Yazan describes as “genocide capitalism,” in which the exchange of scarce food and basic necessities has been exploited for profit by a variety of parties with the means to leverage Israel’s genocide for their own gain. He points to examples such as to Israeli-backed gangs in Gaza that loot and hoard aid to sell at exorbitant prices, killings of civilians at U.S. and Israeli-supported Gaza Humanitarian Foundation aid sites, and wealthier Palestinian families who have created businesses that overcharge people for services such as charging their phones with expensive solar equipment.
Yazan and Alla also point to the role of Gaza’s merchants, who are known to pilfer food and supplies from aid deliveries only to hoard and sell them back to people at exorbitant prices. These merchants, Yazan says, are “just as traitorous as the occupation to the people of Gaza.” They also leverage their control of the flow of cash to enact heavy fees, meaning Bridge of Solidarity must significantly overshoot its fundraising targets to pay intermediaries as much as 50 percent.
In July and August, media outlets reported that fed-up civilians had begun confronting merchants who were selling back flour and other goods they had pilfered from aid deliveries. They organized protests in Gaza City and beyond. In some instances, people even stole back flour.
These larger, community-driven efforts toward mutual aid often go underreported. But the impact of organic mutual aid, whether in the form of zakat or simply as a result of survival instinct, is evident on the ground in Gaza and in the social media presence of Palestinians living there. Some families have taken in young children orphaned in the genocide, while others adopt abandoned pets, with whom they share their tents and limited food supplies. One contact living in a tent encampment told me that over the summer, his family and their neighbors woke up to find bags of flour on their doorsteps—a surprise surplus they shared with others.
Bridge of Solidarity’s fundraising campaigns have primarily focused on Gaza’s doubly-marginalized communities, including Afro-Palestinian communities displaced from Deir el-Balah and healthcare workers. “We listen to the people in Gaza who are in conversations with Yazan at his tent and in the community,” Alla says. “What do they need and want? We also think about the Palestinians that may be getting overlooked or neglected . . . because they don’t have phones or Internet, or because they are orphans without parents, or because they just don’t have access for one reason or another to building relationships with activists internationally.” Their previous campaigns include “Protect Our Elders,” which sent funds, adult diapers, and letters from supporters around the world to elderly Palestinians with little or no surviving family. Their current campaign, for which they’ve raised more than $50,000 so far, focuses on purchasing heating supplies and warm clothes as winter arrives in Gaza.
To publicize their work online, Alla writes, creates art, and produces social media content for their English-language audience. Meanwhile, in Gaza, Yazan takes care of everything else, from aid deliveries to visiting communities to learn what they need. Their Instagram page features videos of Yazan and other volunteers distributing aid to Palestinians in Gaza. In their online content, Yazan and Alla also outline their principles for mutual aid that “reject[s] the Western gaze.” In a post illustrated by Alla from August, they note that collective members photograph the distributed aid, prep work, and receipts to “cultivate trust and accountability,” but they do not photograph recipients unless the recipients themselves suggest doing so. “Our organization is against the Western gaze,” the post reads. “We refuse to humiliate people.”
Each time I’ve reached out to Alla and Yazan since the ceasefire began, Yazan has been busy responding to the shifting needs of other civilians, preparing for the arrival of those displaced from Gaza City and sourcing tents for families affected by the floods that have inundated much of Gaza in mid-November—including the massive and massively crowded tent city in al-Mawasi. All the while, the prevalence of gangs funded and armed by Israel has led to violence throughout the area.
“Yazan had to pause efforts after the ceasefire in doing really public-facing projects,” Alla says, “because there were many days he was afraid to leave his tent for long periods of time due to the amount of fighting and shooting taking place amongst camps in al-Mawasi due to the Israel-backed gangs.” Instead, he’s shifted to focusing on one-off cash deliveries for families with specific requests, such as winter clothes. These new challenges have made it difficult for Yazan to keep up Bridge of Solidarity’s momentum. But that hasn’t stopped him from thinking about the future.
“Me and my sister Alla have a dream that when I survive the genocide and grow up, I’ll start a company that's a better alternative to Western Union,” he says, “to support people who are living through genocides and wars, to get them money easily. I haven't decided if I'll call the company Yazan Western or Alla Union. What do you think?”
And Alla tells The Progressive the only worthwhile future she sees is one that includes her dear friend and the possibility they could meet in real life. “He’s my favorite comrade that I’ve ever had,” she says. “The best little brother anyone could ever have.”