While the rest of the world struggles to comprehend Israel’s bombardment of civilians in Lebanon, which has resulted in the death and disfigurement of children and the displacement of hundreds of thousands, a majority of business lobbyists have continued to openly support Israel in its genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza.
For people all over the world, crowdfunding has emerged as a powerful tool for raising online donations on behalf of individuals and organizations that distribute resources. Platforms like GoFundMe and LaunchGood have facilitated millions of dollars for charitable causes ranging from medical bills to disaster relief. However, as the war in Gaza reveals, these platforms are not the impartial, benevolent actors that they purport to be. Instead, they are often complicit in a for-profit system based on hefty commissions that exploits Palestinian suffering.
Countless individuals, families, and organizations have created crowdfunding campaigns to raise money for medical care, evacuation from Gaza, or necessities for survival. Major crowdfunding and payment platforms, however, appear to be covertly restricting or blocking donations intended for war victims in Gaza. There are reports of shadowbanning, account closures, and exorbitant service charges from platforms like GoFundMe, Google Pay, and PayPal, among others.
While GoFundMe has blocked donations for Palestinian families and organizations for technicalities like posting the fundraising link on Instagram or other “violations of terms of service,” some payment apps like PayPal appear to have blocked donations from some users when the descriptions include the word “Gaza.” This is compounded by censorship by Meta and the banning of online content on Instagram about the war in Gaza, as extensively documented by Human Rights Watch.
In the absence of steady international aid, many victims of the war are dependent on these crowdfunding and social media platforms. Arwa Musa is one. She was two months pregnant on October 7, 2023, when the Israel-Hamas war began. She was living in Gaza with her husband, Abdul Rahman Ahmed Al-Kurd; her three daughters, Lana, Lin, and Aseel; and her son, Yahya. Her fourth daughter was born in April 2024, two months after her parents, brothers, and sisters were all killed in Israeli bombings. To remember them, she decided to name her daughter Rawan, after her sister who was killed. In the first three days of the war, her husband Abdul lost his sister’s family in bombings.
When Musa’s husband’s brother, who is based in Belgium, began raising funds for the family, he decided to use GoFundMe. The fundraiser raised $19,000 to fund diapers and milk for baby Rawan, and canned food and vegetables for the rest of the family. But the platform took 20 percent of the collected money as a commission and later, currency exchange centers in Gaza charged inflated currency exchange rates, as such services have become more expensive in the war zone.
The total funds that reached Musa were less than 70 percent of the original amount donated through GoFundMe in her name. And now, her account, run by her husband’s brother, is among the many Palestinian accounts that have been shadowbanned, as bombing of Gaza and settler violence in the West Bank show no signs of abating.
Through commissions and exchange rates, platforms like GoFundMe are profiting from donations meant for people in desperate circumstances, turning the suffering of war victims into a revenue stream. But crowdfunding platforms also control which fundraising campaigns are allowed to be conducted on their sites—and which are shut down.
The Sameer Project, a London-based mutual aid group that has donated more than a million liters of clean water to residents of Gaza, saw this process firsthand. Hala Sabbah, one of the founders of the Sameer Project, says the group established itself in memory of her uncle, Sameer Abu Salim, who was killed during Israeli bombings of Gaza in January 2024. In April 2024, the group established a GoFundMe campaign to provide tents, food, and water for people in southern Gaza. After raising $250,000, the platform informed Sabbah it was shutting down the fundraiser—and sending all of the money back to the original donors. GoFundMe said the campaign was in “violation of its terms of service.”
“It was extremely vague,” Sabbah says. “We asked, ‘What exactly did we violate?’ We then provided [GoFundMe] with all the information that they asked for. We were happy to appeal and give them more information, but they stopped answering us and canceled the fundraiser.” However, “what is most infuriating,” she says, is that she still doesn’t know what has happened to the $44,000 that GoFundMe had charged as a commission, 20 percent of the funds that had been raised.
The Sameer Project then went on to establish another fundraiser on Chuffed.org, a progressive fundraising platform based in Australia, but they have only managed to raise $56,000 so far. Their months of hard work on the initial campaign all disappeared like a ghost.
“If the accounts hadn’t been frozen, we could have [gotten] seventy to eighty tents in Gaza,” Sabbah says. “Unfortunately, recently there was a huge bombing of Khan Yunus refugee camp. If we had that money, we would have some tents and set them up for the families so they’d have replacements for their tents bombed by Israel. However, we have zero tents now, and hundreds of people sleeping on the streets. All of this because of GoFundMe.”
One part of the Sameer Project’s programming is running community kitchens that feed people in northern Gaza. Sabbah says the action by GoFundMe has also hindered the group’s ability to operate these. “We used to feed children in two or three schools in one day, now we can cover only one,” she explains. “If we used to give ten water trucks, now we can only afford two.” She says the organization now plans to take legal action against GoFundMe.
This policing of fundraising for Palestinians affected by the current war has a chilling effect, deterring Palestinians and allies from using these platforms. In light of these problems, Palestinians and their allies have begun to look into alternatives to the major crowdfunding platforms. Some have turned to blockchain-based solutions like Circle, Hesabpay, and Worldpay, which provide more transparency and reduced expenses.
Others have worked to establish direct ties between donors and recipients, eliminating all middlepeople. Some, like Sabbah, have opted for progressive crowdfunding platforms like Chuffed.org, but the system of crowdfunding is heavily biased against victims of genocide in Gaza in particular, and people from developing countries in general who happen to be on the wrong side of the U.S.-NATO-Israel colonial-military-industrial nexus.
If platforms like GoFundMe claim to be vehicles of mutual aid, they should stop charging fees to war victims, and cease shutting down campaigns meant to provide them with basic facilities.