Six months after the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel, as Israel pressed its retaliatory war in Gaza, Daniel Sokatch, the New Israel Fund’s CEO, faced a thorny decision. He knew that he wanted to partner with organizations to support Gazan civilians, but nonprofits in Gaza were almost universally viewed skeptically by the mainstream Jewish world, some were actively vilified, he told eJewishPhilanthropy.

“We have to find people who we trust,” he said, “and we have to trust them the way our donors and supporters trust us.”

Since then, the NIF has raised over $3.2 million for aid to Gazan civilians provided by World Central Kitchen, Clean Shelter and the International Rescue Committee, organizations that provide food, water, shelter and sanitation services. The campaign began pre-Passover 2024, and surpassed its $3 million goal last month.

According to Sokatch, NIF offers American Jews “a hechsher” for donations to Gaza aid efforts, referring to the stamp of kosher approval. “If it’s NIF, I know that it’s not anti-Israel. It’s anti-this-Israeli-policy and this-Israeli-government’s-approach,” he said.

The issue of Jewish support for humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza has divided the Jewish community since the start of Israel’s war against the Hamas terror group after the Oct. 7 terror attacks. Some critics consider Palestinians, most of whom supported the Hamas massacres, to be an enemy population not deserving Jewish support; others fear that humanitarian aid will be looted by Hamas and allow the terror group to continue the war; and others consider it to be a squandering of communal resources at a time of great need in Israel, following nearly two years of war, and in the Jewish world in general.

Though Jewish-backed aid initiatives were relatively rare in the early days of the war, they have become more common and mainstream over time, with groups such as SmartAid, IsraAid and World Jewish Relief getting involved. Though much of this has been happening quietly, those efforts became increasingly public this summer as conditions in Gaza worsened.

Sokatch, who was previously executive director of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties, commended recent statements acknowledging the humanitarian crisis in Gaza by the Reform and Conservative movements as well as the UJA-Federation of New York’s donation of $1 million to humanitarian aid in Gaza through IsraAid.

NIF typically supports initiatives that advance liberal democracy within Israel, so this campaign fell outside its usual scope of work. There was also the concern that the aid provided by NIF could make its way to terrorists. But Sokatch said an Israeli staff member helped assuage that fear. “There is always a chance that some of the food aid that we support going into Gaza ends up in the hands of Hamas,” he recalled the employee telling him. “But there’s also a chance it ends up in the hands of a hostage.”

That was all Sokatch needed to hear. When he pitched the campaign to the board, he expected pushback, but it never came. “Everybody on the board unanimously supported this,” he said. “Israeli, American, European, Australian, Canadian, Palestinian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian.” After the campaign launched, NIF donors showed nothing but enthusiasm. The only people upset were those who never supported the NIF anyway, Sokatch said. “Those are people who criticize us for everything.”

Donations streamed in steadily through 2024 and into 2025, as the humanitarian situation in Gaza worsened, with a boost this past Passover when the organization spotlighted it. Over the past three years, NIF has gained over 7,000 new donors, many of whom came to NIF because of its Gaza campaign, Sokatch said. They came to support Gazan civilians, but stayed to support civil rights within Israel.

“We definitely have a wonderful group of six-figure donors,” Sokatch said about typical funding to NIF, including from longtime donors the Dorot Foundation and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, “but we have a huge base of this pyramid of people who, year after year, give $500 or $5,000 or $15,000, and they’re incredibly loyal, and they stick with us, and that number just grows and grows every year.”

The campaign allowed Clean Shelter, which was founded by a Palestinian woman and Israeli woman living in Germany, to feed 94 families living in the Zomi Shelter, a camp made up of 100 tents. Thanks to NIF, Clean Shelter was also able to purchase a desalination unit that delivers clean drinking water to tens of thousands of displaced families in six nearby camps.

Through the WCK, NIF helped provide hundreds of thousands of hot meals throughout Gaza. “The fact that NIF engaged with WCK early to support Gaza has made a huge difference in our ability to meet the needs of families every step of the way,” Tunde Wackman, World Central Kitchen chief development officer, told eJP. “It’s also helped us build a strong model and team that has made it possible for us to now scale up even further to meet enormous needs on the ground.”

The reason NIF was able to find trusted partners and understand what was going on in Gaza was because they believed what they heard from sources they trusted, Sokatch said. “Every time you look at anything that World Central Kitchen posts online, someone says, ‘How do you know the aid is getting in? Hamas is taking all the aid.’ Well, these are things that people feel or fear, but they’re not a reflection of reality.”

Sokatch said NIF maintains a lot of “boots on the ground” in order to gather information about the humanitarian situation in Gaza. “We didn’t feel comfortable with the excuse, ‘Well, we don’t know who to believe.’ We did know who to believe,” he said.

While NIF hailed its $3 million Gaza aid milestone, this amounts to slightly more than a tenth of the amount that it has raised for causes within Israel during the same period.

NIF has raised some $25 million for Israeli initiatives such as the Hostages and Missing Families Forum, repairing the Western Negev communities that were devastated in the Oct. 7 attacks and ensuring the Arab and Jewish conflict within Gaza and the West Bank doesn’t spill into Israel.

“Things are super dark right now,” Sokatch said, before referencing a line from Pirkei Avot: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”

“Our job needs to be continuing to spark the kind of hope that gives people a sense that a different horizon is possible,” he said.