A Volunteer’s Story: Why I Keep Showing Up for Gaza

Every month, hundreds of volunteers give Fight for Palestine their hands, their weekends, and their hearts — packing parcels, teaching children, carrying water containers, keeping lists. We rarely tell their stories, mostly because they keep deflecting the question. This month, one of them agreed to stop deflecting.

Rana, 26, joined our warehouse team last spring intending to help for a single weekend. She is still with us a year later, now leading a packing shift. What follows is her story, in her own words, lightly edited for length.

“I came because I couldn’t watch anymore”

I signed up on my phone at two in the morning. I had been scrolling news about Gaza for hours, the way you do, feeling that awful combination of heartbreak and uselessness. The volunteer form asked for my availability and whether I could lift ten kilograms. That was all. It felt almost absurdly small compared to the size of what I was feeling.

My first shift was a Saturday morning at the parcel warehouse. Nobody gave a speech. A coordinator named Layla handed me a checklist and said, ‘Flour on the bottom, oil upright, dates on top so they don’t get crushed.’ For four hours I thought about nothing except flour, oil, and dates. It was the most peace I had felt in months.

I remember being surprised by how organized everything was. I think part of me expected chaos — good intentions and cardboard everywhere. Instead there were packing standards taped to the tables, manifests, quality checks, a whiteboard with the week’s targets. It mattered to me more than I can explain. It meant the feeling I had carried in at two in the morning was being converted into something with weight and a tracking number.

What the work actually looks like

People imagine volunteering for a cause like this is dramatic. It is not. It is repetitive, physical, and deeply particular. You learn that a parcel packed in the wrong order arrives with crushed dates and a leaked oil bottle, and that a family opening it feels that carelessness. So you pack carefully, a thousand times over.

Over the months I rotated through nearly everything: labeling learning kits for the education team, assembling hygiene kits, inventory counts, loading trucks before dawn distributions. Once, I spent an entire shift writing children’s names on school bags in my best handwriting because a coordinator said, ‘A child should see their name written beautifully.’ I think about that sentence more than almost anything anyone has said to me.

You cannot fix everything. But you can pack this one parcel perfectly, for this one family. Do that a thousand times and you have done something no one can dismiss.

The people who keep you coming back

The secret nobody tells you about volunteering is that the community becomes half the reason you stay. Our Saturday shift has a retired schoolteacher who quizzes us on capital cities while we pack, two medical students who come straight from night shifts, and a grandfather who brings enough za’atar manakish for everyone and denies it every week.

We are wildly different people who would never otherwise have met. But hand someone boxes for four hours a week and you learn who they are. When my father was ill last autumn, my shift covered my slots without being asked and sent food to our house. I came to give and found myself receiving. Everyone here will tell you a version of that story.

Leading a shift now, I watch new volunteers arrive the way I arrived — quiet, a little unsure what to do with their hands, carrying more feeling than they know where to put. I hand them the checklist the way Layla handed it to me. By the second hour they are arguing cheerfully about the fastest way to fold a box. By the end of the shift they are asking when they can come back. The work does that. It gives the feeling somewhere to go.

The hard days

I will not pretend it is all warmth. There are days when the news is unbearable and the work feels like a teaspoon against an ocean. There was a week I almost quit, convinced it made no difference. Layla, our field coordinator, did not argue with me. She just showed me the distribution photos from the parcels my shift had packed — real families, holding boxes I had taped shut.

She said, ‘The ocean is not your responsibility. The teaspoon is.’ I stayed. On the hard days, that is the whole philosophy: do your teaspoon, excellently, and trust the thousands of other teaspoons.

I have also learned to let the work hold the grief instead of trying to outrun it. Some Saturdays the whole shift is quieter than usual because the week’s news sat heavily on all of us. Nobody pretends otherwise. We pack anyway. There is a kind of mourning that only has somewhere to go when your hands are full, and I think half the people in that warehouse would tell you the same.

If you are thinking about joining

Come once. That is my whole advice. Do not wait until you feel qualified — the checklist will teach you everything, and someone will show you where the flour goes. Bring closed shoes and expect to be sore in muscles you did not know you had.

You will not fix everything. You will pack one perfect parcel, and then another. And at two in the morning, when the news is heavy, you will feel something I wish I could hand to everyone who is still just scrolling: the specific, durable peace of having actually done something. A year on, I am still here. Come find out why.