Almadhoun checks out the scene from Gaza using WhatsApp on July 17. Photo credit: Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post
As famine has descended on Gaza, hundreds of Palestinian Americans have gathered on a WhatsApp group chat to make desperate pleas on behalf of relatives and friends in the enclave, many trapped and starving.
“Every other day, somebody will say: ‘We have 10 families in this neighborhood. Can somebody get food for them?’” said Hani Almadhoun, a Virginia aid worker and naturalized U.S. citizen who started the group chat years ago and whose parents, multiple siblings and many close friends live in Gaza.
“I’m talking to Palestinians who are upper class, asking me to get their family a pot of soup,” Almadhoun said.
In Gaza, virtually every system of modern life has either collapsed or become unreliable: The banks. The stores. The internet. Cell service. Food distribution is intermittent and hundreds have been killed seeking to collect aid. On Friday, the world’s leading authority on food security officially declared a famine is happening in Gaza City.
Hani Almadhoun, who co-founded the Gaza Soup Kitchen, uses WhatsApp to stay in touch with loved ones and the community in Gaza. Photo credit: Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post
For anguished Palestinians living in the U.S. with relatives and friends trapped in the enclave, the group chat has become a lifeline - a sort of communal bulletin board of urgent appeals for help, but also for information about who might be left alive in neighborhoods that have been bombed.
The chats - which have grown to nearly 500 people - offer a supportive space for people trying to live with the desperation and grief of war, as well as the guilt that comes with watching the horrors unfold from America.
“People feel the need for that togetherness,” Almadhoun said. “It’s been destruction, death, starvation, insecurity, horrible news, mayhem, evacuation, injuries. We’ve lived it all.”
Israel unleashed an unrelenting military campaign that has left most of Gaza in ruins, and imposed repeated and prolonged blockades on aid. Even when aid gets through, it is often dangerous to collect it: More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces since May while trying to get food, according to the United Nations.
Israeli officials have acknowledged a lack of food security in Gaza but have often blamed the U.N. for failures in distributing aid. The U.N. says Israeli authorities are the “sole decision-makers” on who, and how much, aid enters Gaza, as well as the type of supplies that are allowed in.
Back in the United States, the group chat offers a place to anxiously wait for updates, to learn whether relatives survived an aid distribution and to look for alternate ways to get food. Group members often turn to Almadhoun, who runs the Gaza Soup Kitchen, a nonprofit he started during the war that delivers hot meals and clean drinking water, and works for the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian Refugees USA.
Almadhoun himself has repeatedly turned to the group chat for support and information. On July 20, when Israeli troops killed at least 79 Palestinians after one aid distribution, Almadhoun learned from a group chat that two friends were among the dead - including one who helped him with the Gaza Soup Kitchen. A third was shot in the hand trying to get a bag of flour, according to texts, photos and other information shared with The Washington Post.
From logistics to tragedy
When Almadhoun started the group chat during the coronavirus pandemic, it had about 200 members. Since the war in Gaza began, it has grown to nearly 500 people.
Almadhoun said he has repeatedly turned to the group in times of personal loss: Two of his brothers were killed by Israeli strikes a year apart - one in November 2023 and the other in November 2024. Three cousins were killed in a single day earlier this year. His father was rushed to one of northern Gaza’s crumbling hospitals this summer.
Almadhoun said this terrible cadence of grief is not unique among the group’s members.
“We don’t process it. We put it away until the right time,” Almadhoun said. “There are a lot of people in the group who have lost relatives, so we support them and make sure people know they’re going through a hard time.”
Just as importantly, the group chat has become a place to try to work out complicated logistics for surviving the war. Like many others, Almadhoun leans on the group to try to figure out where his parents, siblings, nieces and nephews in northern Gaza should go amid repeated evacuation orders. Often, someone in the group has mentioned a relative with a home in a safer area that’s available for use.
The group chat also has become a place to run down information after Israeli strikes. After one bombing in the first several weeks of the war in northern Gaza’s Beit Lahia, for instance - where much of Almadhoun’s family lives - several members posted requests for information about someone they hadn’t been able to reach.
Members of the group chat worked together to find someone in Beit Lahia who was able to receive an international phone call, track down other people’s relatives and deliver updates.
During a near-complete communications blackout early in the war, one of Almadhoun’s brothers managed to call him from a satellite phone belonging to a journalist.
The group has even been a forum for political advice. Under President Joe Biden, Almadhoun and others were occasionally invited to meet with administration officials to discuss the war and the president’s loss of support among Palestinians, Arab Americans and Muslims because of his unconditional support of Israel. Almadhoun often asked the group if he should go to a particular meeting. If he did, he would use the chat to relay information about what was discussed.
Eventually, everyone agreed the meetings with the Biden administration were not worth the effort.
The group has often engaged in passionate debate about who is to blame for Gaza’s misery. Others argue that nobody could have anticipated Israel’s prolonged, brutal response to the Oct. 7 attack. Still others, including Almadhoun, are angry with everyone and have tried to focus their efforts on getting food into Gaza.
‘Is this true?’
Almadhoun and his brother, affectionately known to friends as “Chef Mahmoud,” co-founded the Gaza Soup Kitchen soon after the war began. They used a separate WhatsApp group to coordinate operations.
From his base in America, Almadhoun publicly shared his family’s story - how they chose not to evacuate northern Gaza when Israel first ordered Palestinians to leave because they had nowhere to go in the south - and raised money. From his base in Gaza, Mahmoud worked to source scarce ingredients, set up soup kitchens and cook meals. Mahmoud was well known and beloved in the Gaza group chat, Almadhoun said, as people regularly shared his TikTok videos from the enclave.
On Nov. 30 last year, Almadhoun hit one of his lowest points. His niece told him that Chef Mahmoud had been killed by an Israeli drone. Almadhoun couldn’t believe the news and called his brother, according to a screenshot of their texts. Mahmoud didn’t pick up.
“I started questioning God and faith and America and everybody around me,” Almadhoun said.
Almadhoun posted on Facebook that Mahmoud had been killed. Almost immediately, he said, messages flooded in on the Gaza group chat.
“Is this true?” several members asked. Donations poured in to the Gaza Soup Kitchen in honor of Mahmoud, and group chat members as far away as California offered to fly to the D.C. area for a memorial service.
Early in the war, the Gaza group chat held hope that the conflict would end quickly. Now, however, Palestinian Americans who once feared their relatives would die in airstrikes fear a slower, more agonizing death from hunger. Those in the United States feel guilt and shame that they cannot do more to feed their families.
“This nightmare feels like being thrown into a violent sea,” Almadhoun said. “But we keep going. And if we ever reach shore, we’re not the same as when we went under.”
