PhilipTheBucket

Canary journalist Alaa Shamali is trying to get his family – of five children – safely out of Gaza, but needs your help to make it happen.

Palestinian journalist Alaa Shamali has written unflinchingly on the countless heinous atrocities Israel has perpetrated in Gaza. A little more than a week before the colonial settler state broke the first 2025 supposed ceasefire in March, Alaa started penning his heart-rending prose for the Canary. Now, seven months on, and at the fragile precipice of another so-called ceasefire, his haunting words continue to echo out in the vacuum of a Western mainstream media still clamouring to cover for genocidal war criminals.

Everything he writes, he does with the harrowing clarity and poignancy that can only come from experience and truly knowing the gut-wrenching reality of life under Israeli bombardment and occupation. Because as he has recounted the horrifying details of Israel’s “strangling siege” leaving three-quarters of children in Gaza malnourished, eating sand and drinking contaminated water, and living displaced in “torn tents”, he has told these stories as a record too of his own family’s devastating reality.

Canary journalist Alaa Shamali: an urgent fundraiser for his family in Gaza

As his family’s GoFundMe details, they have been:

living in a small tent, barely 3 meters in size.

It compels readers to try to imagine the utter heartbreak and struggle of:

spending every day, every night, and every moment in such cramped conditions. They need urgent support to rebuild their home and regain a sense of normalcy.

However, it also caveats this with the unfaltering fact that what Alaa’s family has lived through amounts to “unimaginable hardship and loss”.

Because, as for many families in Gaza, this current genocide was not the first time Israel destructively uprooted their lives. The GoFundMe relays how Israel has demolished their home, not once, not twice, but three times in little over the last decade:

Their home in Gaza has been destroyed three times by the wars on Gaza in 2014, 2021, and now again in 2024. Each time they have painstakingly rebuilt their lives and their home, but this time, they have lost not only their home but also any source of income. The compensation for their 2021 home destruction is still pending, and now they face the devastating reality of losing their home once more.

Dima and Ibada: stolen childhoods

Alaa has previously written heartbreakingly as a father:

deprived of the most basic right of fatherhood: to see his five children walk to school in Gaza with peace of mind.

He has recounted the hopes and dreams of his five children – currently living in a displacement camp in Gaza. There’s 15-year-old Dima, his eldest who waits in the displacement tent wondering if she will get the chance to return to school. Alaa penned a particularly painful exchange, where Dima has asked her father:

Dad… will I be able to continue my studies?

And he wrote with palpable grief:

I hear her question echoing inside me at night like an absent school bell. I try to smile and tell her, “You will continue,” but my voice betrays me. How can I reassure her when all I have is my pen, while all the roads to school are blocked by rubble?

The crowdfunder adds another tinge of utter anguish over Dima’s desire for the most basic things a young teenager might hope for, simply:

decorating her room with the best furniture and devices, to build a future alongside her four younger siblings.

Israel has forced next eldest 13-year-old Ibada to grow up “before his time”, stealing his childhood so:

His voice, which used to be full of enthusiasm, has become hoarse with waiting.

Alaa wrote that it’s as if he carries:

the burdens of adults while still a child.

Salah, Abdullah, and Lina: playing in the corridors of displacement

Alaa’s 12-year-old son Salah has a “deep love for football” and he:

admires stars like Messi, Ronaldo, and Mohamed Salah.

When the fundraiser started in June 2024, Salah hadn’t watched “a match in nine months”. He had already missed an entire school year. Well over a year on, Alaa wrote how Salah and ten-year-old son Abdullah:

were the mirror of childhood in my home. Their laughter on the way to school and their running on the way back gave me the feeling that life was still possible despite the war.

Today, he says:

that innocence has been stolen from them, and they play in the corridors of displacement instead of schoolyards.

However, what “breaks” Alaa’s heart “the most” is his “little girl”, his youngest, 6-year-old Lina:

When I look at her, I feel that her entire childhood is being silently assassinated. She is growing up outside of school, like a flower without water, and her pain alone is enough to fill a thousand news reports. But all I can do is carry her silence and broadcast it to the world.

In her own words, Lina has captured the plaintive tragedy of a child growing up under constant genocidal siege:

Bombing over our heads and such. Nothing but missiles above us. We get hit a lot. Leave behind our childhood. I’m still a little girl.

And Lina has expressed the most simple hope of all children in Gaza:

End the war – we are children – we want to live.

Support Alaa’s family to seek safety and rebuild their lives

Now, Gaza has entered another ceasefire – but Lina’s wish still goes unanswered. Predictably, and as last time, Israel continues to violate it with impunity. It’s still bombing, still murdering, and still maiming Palestinians in refugee camps.

And all the while, it is maintaining the key ingredients of its engineered famine, namely, its blockades severing access to sorely-needed aid. The UNRWA has detailed that 6,000 trucks loaded with food, tents, and medicines enough for the entire population of Gaza for three months:

remain stuck at the Gaza border, waiting to be allowed in.

It’s why Alaa’s family needs your help to move to Egypt, where:

they can find safety and begin to rebuild their lives. Every donation, no matter the amount, can make a significant difference. Please donate to help this family escape the horrors of war and start anew.

As Alaa himself has written, Gaza:

does not ask for pity, but for justice. It does not ask only for aid, but for the right to live like others. It asks to sleep without fear, to open a school, or to light a small lamp at night without it being considered a luxury.

For his family and others from Gaza to live safe, secure, fulfilling lives once more, is a powerful act of resistance after two years of genocide. In the spirit of mutual aid and solidarity, the Canary implores readers, wherever they can, to continue supporting Palestinians’ crowdfunders.

Alaa has been supporting his family as he writes full-time for the Canary. But amid the immense costs of essentials in Gaza, and the enormous expenses of them leaving the Strip for a new life, his wages can only go so far. You can donate to Alaa’s family’s fundraiser here.

Feature image supplied.

By Hannah Sharland

I am not joking. Empathy was what he wanted to talk about, before he was interrupted by someone pointing out that his dog was suffering and he had to briefly deal with the inconvenience of awkwardly refusing to do anything about it.

I am not joking. Empathy was what he wanted to talk about, before he was interrupted by someone pointing out that his dog was suffering and he had to briefly deal with the inconvenience of completely refusing to do anything about it.

For context: People are claiming that Hasan Piker shocked his dog with a shock collar on stream for basically no reason and got very mad at him. He put out a video showing her collar for 0.001 seconds in the world's most awkward hand grip and saying it was clearly a vibration collar and his enemies are trying to ruin his life as they always do. People including myself are still suspicious.

I looked at the allegations in this video myself a little, and I won't swear to the model numbers or anything but it all sounds right to me. You may need to pause the video to look at his images, he scrolls past them irritatingly quickly. There does however definitely look to me to be tape on the back of that thing. This is from Hasan's explanation stream where he showed the collar:

Click to see the raw image and zoom it, and you'll see pretty clearly that most of the box is shiny dark black plastic with bright white highlights, and then there's a clear off-kilter rectangle of something that's matte dark grey instead, without much in the way of highlights. You can also see vague shadows of two little circular things that could be prong sockets covered by tape or could just be weird compression artifacts or something.

Here it is with contrast adjusted:

You can see the rectangle of the tape, and then some kind of distortion at the top that might be a prong socket, and a pretty clear circular shape at the bottom that definitely looks like it could be one.

In another part of the video you can see that circular part under the tape even more clearly. Look between his fingers to see the clear circular shape, you can even see wrinkles in the tape around the circular protrusion:

Yes, I'm already aware that the Hasan stans will say I'm making all this up and it's not there and they don't see anything. Anyway, that's what it is. If I did my math right, those frames are from https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2586575954 and the timestamps are, respectively for the three images:

• 43:58.396
• 44:09.292
• 44:09.333

Somebody inform reddit, the drama must flow.

This is who we are now. We are the country that makes people who aren’t white leave the country because they’re not white. And this is according to this administration’s own press release, which celebrates the fact that we’re now the inverse of the words engraved at the Statue of Liberty’s base, which read:

Give me your tired, your poorYour huddled masses yearning to breathe freeThe wretched refuse of your teeming shoreSend these, the homeless, tempest-tost to meI lift my lamp beside the golden door!

That was when America was great… or at least periodically tried to be. This is who we are now:

The Trump administration is on pace to shatter historic records and deport nearly 600,000 illegal aliens by the end of President Donald Trump’s first year since returning to office. Two million illegal aliens have left the United States in less than 250 days, including an estimated 1.6 million who have voluntarily self-deported and more than 400,000 deportations.

Are these records we want to be “shattering?” This doesn’t sound like America, the melting pot that once used to be a welcoming refuge for those subjected to violence, poverty, political/religious persecution in their home countries. Now, we’re just the nation of Get The Fuck Out, ejecting hard-working non-criminals who commit fewer crimes and pay more taxes than those blessed to be white enough to avoid this ethnic purge that’s been marketed as making this nation “safer.” Leave before ICE comes for you. The alternatives — foreign gulags, war-torn countries, perennial human rights violators — are worse than leaving for your home country before the government goons make this decision for you.

I mean, listen to this fucking bullshit:

“The numbers don’t lie: 2 million illegal aliens have been removed or self-deported in just 250 days— proving that President Trump’s policies and Secretary Noem’s leadership are working and making American communities safe,” said Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin. “Ramped-up immigration enforcement targeting the worst of the worst is removing more and more criminal illegal aliens off our streets every day and is sending a clear message to anyone else in this country illegally: Self-deport or we will arrest and deport you.”

This is a lie. And it’s not even a particularly crafty one. Anyone with half-assed Googling skills could prove this assertion wrong. Most immigrants don’t commit criminal acts, and those who do commit criminal acts do it at a rate that’s far lower than that of natural-born citizens of this country.

ICE pretends that it’s doing God’s work (literally pretends, lest you think otherwise) but all it’s really doing is targeting people because of their skin color and depriving them of their due process rights.

ICE’s own stats make it clear that every word coming out of the government’s mouth in reference to immigration enforcement is a lie, not that this administration gives a single fuck whether or not anyone thinks it’s lying.

Immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in US immigration detention, according to data released by the government. The number of people with no criminal history arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and detained by the Trump administration has now surpassed the number of those charged with crimes.

[…]

According to the official data, 16,523 people in immigration detention with no criminal record were arrested by Ice, compared to 15,725 who do have a criminal record and 13,767 with pending criminal charges.

Everyone knows the government doesn’t really care whether you have a criminal record or not. The constant pressure from the administration to increase daily arrests means that being a migrant and/or having brown skin makes you a target. The message has been sent: only whites are welcome here. That’s why people are self-deporting. And that’s why the data shows ICE has long since run out of the “worst of the worst” to target:

If you combine the two non-criminal numbers (those without a criminal charge and those who have not been convicted), it’s a 2:1 ratio to immigrants who are actually convicted criminals. These are the actions of a regime that is no longer content to wrap itself in the flag while shitting on long-held American ideals. Now, it’s trying to pretend that doing the worst it can to the “least of my brethren” is doing the Lord’s work — that somehow the God that defined himself with single word in the Bible (“love”) would condone the relentless cruelty that is Trump’s mass deportation program.

We’re being robbed of a better future — not just because this administration has demonstrated the system of checks and balances is irrevocably flawed, but also because we’re actively hunting and ejecting some the most wonderful, hardest-working people in this nation: people who came to this country because it was still the Land of Opportunity. And the only thing this administration is demonstrating to people all over the world is that the United States can be just as awful as nations we can only now condemn hypocritically.

For context: People are claiming that Hasan Piker shocked his dog with a shock collar on stream for basically no reason and got very mad at him. He put out a video showing her collar for 0.001 seconds in the world's most awkward hand grip and saying it was clearly a vibration collar and his enemies are trying to ruin his life as they always do. People including myself are still suspicious.

I looked at the allegations in this video myself a little, and I won't swear to the model numbers or anything but it all sounds right to me. You may need to pause the video to look at his images, he scrolls past them irritatingly quickly. There does however definitely look to me to be tape on the back of that thing. This is from Hasan's explanation stream where he showed the collar:

Click to see the raw image and zoom it, and you'll see pretty clearly that most of the box is shiny dark black plastic with bright white highlights, and then there's a clear off-kilter rectangle of something that's matte dark grey instead, without much in the way of highlights. You can also see vague shadows of two little circular things that could be prong sockets covered by tape or could just be weird compression artifacts or something.

Here it is with contrast adjusted:

You can see the rectangle of the tape, and then some kind of distortion at the top that might be a prong socket, and a pretty clear circular shape at the bottom that definitely looks like it could be one.

In another part of the video you can see that circular part under the tape even more clearly. Look between his fingers to see the clear circular shape, you can even see wrinkles in the tape around the circular protrusion:

Yes, I'm already aware that the Hasan stans will say I'm making all this up and it's not there and they don't see anything. Anyway, that's what it is. If I did my math right, those frames are from https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2586575954 and the timestamps are, respectively for the three images:

• 43:58.396
• 44:09.292
• 44:09.333

Somebody inform reddit, the drama must flow.

For context: People are claiming that Hasan Piker shocked his dog with a shock collar on stream for basically no reason, and got very mad at him. He put out a video showing her collar for 0.001 seconds in the world's most awkward hand grip and saying it was clearly a vibration collar and his enemies are trying to ruin his life as they always do. People including myself are still suspicious.

I looked at the allegations in this video myself a little, and I won't swear to the model numbers or anything but it all sounds right to me. You may need to pause the video to look at his images, he scrolls past them irritatingly quickly. There does however definitely look to me to be tape on the back of that thing. This is from Hasan's explanation stream where he showed the collar:

Click to see the raw image and zoom it, and you'll see pretty clearly that most of the box is shiny dark black plastic with bright white highlights, and then there's a clear off-kilter rectangle of something that's matte dark grey instead, without much in the way of highlights. You can also see vague shadows of two little circular things that could be prong sockets covered by tape or could just be weird compression artifacts or something.

Here it is with contrast adjusted, IDK whether this makes it more or less clear:

You can see the rectangle of the tape, and then some kind of distortion at the top that might be a prong socket, and a pretty clear circular shape at the bottom that definitely looks like it could be one.

In another part of the video you can see that circular part under the tape even more clearly. Look between his fingers to see the clear circular shape, you can even see wrinkles in the tape around the circular protrusion:

Yes, I'm already aware that the Hasan stans will say I'm making all this up and it's not there and they don't see anything. Anyway, that's what it is. If I did my math right, those frames are from https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2586575954 and the timestamps are, respectively for the three images:

• 43:58.396
• 44:09.292
• 44:09.333

Somebody inform reddit, the drama must flow.