For Gaza’s Precious Children
Today, December 16, 2025, I was moved to my core as we gathered in shared witness: listening, reflecting, and holding what it means to respond to immense human need with compassion and responsibility. We heard from Dr. David Hasan, a Palestinian-American neurosurgeon, Duke University professor, and the founder of the Gaza Children’s Village (GCV). Drawing on his frontline medical missions in Gaza, Dr. Hasan spoke about the collapse of critical systems and the decision to envision something more: a community-led model of care that protects children not only in moments of crisis, but also over the long term.
If you weren’t able to join us live, I highly encourage you to watch the recording. It offers a powerful reflection on how dignity, protection, and concrete, life-saving work are already taking root in Gaza.
The Gaza Children’s Village has become a refuge for orphaned and highly vulnerable children across the Gaza Strip. Today, GCV serves more than 8,500 children, providing safe, structured daily environments where children can learn, heal, and grow, supported by education, nutrition, medical care, and psychosocial support.
Throughout the conversation, Dr. Hasan shared how the Gaza Children’s Village is creating pockets of stability in a place where almost nothing is stable anymore — places where children who have lost nearly everything can find safety, play, learning, and the simple dignity of being cared for.
He also spoke of the urgent effort now underway to convert an existing facility into what will become Gaza’s only tertiary children’s hospital, a lifeline for newborns, for children with injuries that can’t wait, for families who have nowhere to turn. In a landscape stripped of the most basic medical infrastructure, this hospital is not just important. It is essential to survival and to the futures of so many little ones.
The event today was held with such tenderness by our moderator Mai Shahin, a therapist, peace activist, and trauma-focused practitioner with Combatants for Peace.
As I reflect on what we heard today, I keep returning to poet Mary Oliver’s words:
“I tell you this
to break your heart,
by which I mean only
that it break open
and never close again
to the rest of the world.”
Today felt like that: a breaking open, and an invitation to keep our hearts open.
The Gaza Children’s Village exists because one person refused to look away from immense suffering. It continues because communities far from Gaza see the humanity of these children and choose, again and again, to respond with action rather than despair.
For children who have lost siblings and parents, homes and safety, futures they should have grown into, this work is nothing less than a lifeline.
If your heart opened today, we invite you to take the next step with us. To carry forward what you witnessed. To share this work with others. And to support a project that is transforming heartbreak into life-saving repair.
You can learn more about the Gaza Children’s Village and support their work here: 👉 https://www.thegazachildrenvillage.org/
Thank you for helping build a future worthy of Gaza’s precious children.
