What has happened in Gaza is one of the gravest humanitarian catastrophes of our time. Families have been displaced again and again, homes and hospitals destroyed, and famine was confirmed in August 2025. Behind every index and percentage in this article are people whose need did not shrink when the headlines did.
Charities have been part of the response from the start, local and international, delivering food, water, shelter and medical care, often at great risk to their staff and partners on the ground. That work, and the generosity of the donors who pay for it, is not in question here.
This article asks a narrower question: what part does the media play in how much help reaches a crisis? For most people, news coverage is how they first see a disaster happening far away. So what happens to giving when the cameras move on, and how can charities keep help flowing when a catastrophe is not getting the coverage it needs?
Fundraisers for Gaza all describe the same thing: when the news moves on, giving falls. This study puts a number on it. At Wusul we worked with an international charity on its donor data, and the pattern was clear. This analysis sets twenty-two months of that charity's Gaza giving against global news coverage and Wikipedia readership, with Ramadan, Dhul Hijjah and the year-end season held constant.
About the data: the charity is not named. Donations appear only as indexes and percentage changes, never as totals. The period is 1 January 2025 to 28 October 2026.
Why this question
Comparing one week before and after a news moment cannot separate attention from everything else that moves giving, and in Muslim giving the calendar moves it most. Ramadan alone can multiply a week's giving tenfold. So we used twenty-two months of weekly data from one charity to ask how much of the change in Gaza giving follows attention once the calendar is taken out.
Attention fell by about 60%. Gaza giving fell, other giving did not.
Every measure of attention fell by a similar amount between the first ten months of 2025 and the first ten months of 2026. On the giving side the fall is concentrated in Gaza, and above all in new donors. The charity's other causes raised the same amount from more gifts.
The same drop shows up in what newsrooms publish. We counted the headlines of one major international English-language news site, unnamed here: Gaza stories fell 51%, from 11.2% to 4.0% of everything the site published.
Attention
Giving to Gaza
Everything else the charity raises
Week by week, the two lines move together outside the holy months
Attention peaked twice in 2025: around the January ceasefire and, much higher, from August to mid-October as famine was confirmed and the second ceasefire was negotiated. It fell sharply after 10 October 2025 and has stayed low since. New Gaza donors trace the same shape, except in Ramadan and Dhul Hijjah, when the calendar overwhelms everything else.
Swipe sideways to see the whole period.
Weekly totals, Monday to Sunday, 95 complete weeks from 30 December 2024 to 25 October 2026.
Taking the calendar out
For each week we regressed the logarithm of Gaza giving on the logarithm of attention, while holding constant: the charity's non-Gaza giving that week, which captures its overall campaign activity and general donor mood; the share of the week falling in Ramadan, its last ten nights, the first ten days of Dhul Hijjah, the Giving Tuesday and year-end period, and winter; and a time trend. Standard errors allow for week-to-week correlation (Newey-West, four lags).
The coefficient is an elasticity: the percentage change in giving that goes with a 1% change in attention.
Attention measured by news share (GDELT)
Attention measured by Wikipedia views
Three results hold across both measures of attention.
- New donors respond most. Their elasticity is about twice that of total Gaza gifts. Existing donors keep giving to Gaza when the news is quiet; people who have never given are the ones who need the news to find the cause.
- The effect is specific to Gaza. Gaza attention does not significantly predict giving to the charity's other causes (elasticities of 0.09 and 0.07, both far from significant). If attention only stood in for a general giving mood, those would be as large as the Gaza rows.
- The size is enough to explain the year. Applied to the actual fall in attention, the estimates predict 28% to 54% fewer new Gaza donors (actual: −41%) and 22% to 37% less Gaza money (actual: −26%), holding everything else as it was.
Month by month, Gaza's share of the news sets Gaza's share of giving
The charity raises money for many causes, so a simpler test needs no model at all: in months when Gaza took a bigger share of the news, did Gaza take a bigger share of what donors gave? Across 22 months the correlation is 0.62 (p = 0.002).
Swipe sideways to see the whole chart.
Gaza's share of one-off giving was 51% in January to October 2025 and 44% in the same months of 2026. The highest points, July and August 2025, came during the famine coverage.
The seasons hold up, but they redirect
Ramadan and Qurbani bring donors back whatever the news is doing. What changes is where their money goes.
| Season, 2026 against 2025 | Gaza news share | Gaza giving (value) | Gaza gifts | New Gaza donors | Non-Gaza giving (value) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ramadan (30 days each year) | −57% | −21% | −10% | −42% | −19% |
| First ten days of Dhul Hijjah | −52% | −43% | +6% | −34% | +24% |
Swipe sideways to see every column.
In Ramadan, Gaza fell about as much as everything else, so the whole season was weaker in 2026. New Gaza donors still fell twice as fast. In Dhul Hijjah the pattern is sharper: the number of Gaza gifts rose slightly, but they were smaller, and Qurbani money went to other countries instead. Ramadan 2026 began on 18 February and Dhul Hijjah on 18 May, about ten days earlier than in 2025; both windows follow the Islamic calendar, not the Gregorian month.
The week after the October 2025 ceasefire
In this charity's data, the week after the 10 October ceasefire (16 to 22 October) against the week before (9 to 15 October), as daily averages:
| Measure | Change |
|---|---|
| Gaza news articles (GDELT) | −46% |
| Wikipedia views of Gaza pages | −61% |
| Gaza gifts | −13% |
| Gaza giving (value) | −19% |
| Non-Gaza gifts | −7% |
The drop is real. Read with the elasticities above, one week of falling coverage takes a moderate bite out of giving. The larger damage came from attention staying low for a year.
What attention does not explain
The number of Gaza gifts barely changed between the two years (−1%), while the value of Gaza giving fell 26%. The average Gaza gift has been well below its 2025 level in every month since June 2026. Part of this is the charity's own choice: in 2026 it withdrew several fixed-price Gaza products, such as food parcels, which had carried higher average gifts, and kept open-amount appeals. Attention measures cannot account for that, and the model's controls do not remove it. The estimates for the value of giving are therefore less stable than the donor estimates (see the appendix).
When a crisis falls out of the news: what charities can do
The need in Gaza did not fall when the coverage did. The findings point to a division of labour: the news brings in new donors, and the charity keeps them. When coverage is thin, the work shifts to that second job, and to building ways of being heard that do not depend on the front page.
- Protect retention when coverage is low. Treat acquisition for Gaza as news-dependent and retention as not. When coverage is low, put the budget into existing donors, monthly giving and renewals, where giving holds. When coverage rises, raise acquisition spend within days.
- Become the news for your own donors. When the media goes quiet, many supporters hear about the crisis only from you. Send regular, honest updates from the field by email, SMS and WhatsApp: what is happening, what was delivered, what is still needed. Existing donors keep giving when the news is quiet; give them a reason to stay close.
- Turn new donors into regular givers while attention is high. A spike in coverage brings in people who would not otherwise find the cause. Ask them early for a monthly gift, so their support continues after the headlines fade.
- Tell the story from the ground, with dignity. Your field teams and local partners are witnesses the news may not reach. Short videos, voice notes and photos, shared with consent and without stripping people of their dignity, can carry a crisis that is missing from the front page.
- Work through community voices. Imams, mosques, community media and trusted creators reach Muslim audiences when mainstream news does not. Brief them with facts and a clear ask, and let them speak in their own words.
- Help journalists come back to the story. Offer data, spokespeople and access to field partners. A newsroom that has the material is more likely to return to a crisis it has moved on from.
- Put the forgotten crisis in the season's lead ask. Ramadan and Qurbani bring donors in regardless of the news, but without the news they choose other causes. Put Gaza in the season's lead ask, with a priced, tangible product.
- Watch attention every week, and be ready to move within it. Gaza's share of news and Wikipedia readership are free and public, and both forecast new Gaza donors. The response to coverage is immediate and fades within two weeks, so appeals, creative and landing pages for a spike need to be prepared in advance, not briefed after the headline.
None of this replaces the news. But a charity that has kept its donors close and built its own channels does not have to wait for the cameras to return before help can reach people.
Limitations
- This is one charity's donors, and the design is observational. The estimates show how closely giving tracks attention after the calendar is held constant; they do not prove that attention causes giving.
- The charity also increases its own Gaza appeals when Gaza is in the news. Non-Gaza giving controls for its overall activity, but not for Gaza-specific emails and ads; advertising spend was not available. Part of the estimated effect may be the charity's response to the news rather than the donors'.
- GDELT codes news automatically and can misplace locations. Its article volume dropped during an outage from 15 June to 1 July 2025; the share measure is used for that reason.
- Wikipedia readership is global and English-language, not limited to the charity's donors.
- Gaza is defined by product name, so the measure misses unrestricted gifts given because of Gaza.
Frequently asked questions
Does news coverage of Gaza affect donations?
In this study, yes. When Gaza's share of world news fell 62% between January to October 2025 and the same months of 2026, new donors whose first gift went to Gaza fell 41% and the value of Gaza giving fell 26%, while giving to the charity's other causes held level (−1%).
Which donors react most to the news?
New donors. Their elasticity is about twice that of total Gaza gifts: a week with 10% less attention brings roughly 4% to 8% fewer new Gaza donors. Existing donors keep giving to Gaza when the news is quiet.
How quickly does giving respond to coverage?
Within the same week. The response fades over two weeks and there is no delayed rebound.
What should charities do when Gaza coverage falls?
Keep existing donors close with regular, honest updates from the field, ask new donors for a monthly gift while attention is high, and put the budget into retention, where giving holds. When coverage rises, raise acquisition spend within days. Gaza's share of news and Wikipedia readership are free and public, and both forecast new Gaza donors.
Appendix: data and robustness
Sources
- Donations: the charity's gift records, daily totals only. One-off gifts; exceptionally large single transactions excluded. A new Gaza donor is someone whose first-ever gift to the charity was made that day and included a Gaza product.
- News share: GDELT 2.0 event records (public BigQuery table gdelt-bq.gdeltv2.events_partitioned). Distinct source articles per day with an event located in Gaza, divided by all distinct articles GDELT processed that day.
- Wikipedia: daily views by people, excluding automated traffic, of the English Wikipedia articles Gaza war, Gaza Strip, Gaza genocide and Gaza Strip famine, from the Wikimedia pageviews API.
Model
ln(giving) = a + b·ln(attention) + c·ln(non-Gaza gifts) + calendar shares + winter + trend, weekly, 95 weeks, Newey-West standard errors with four lags. Calendar shares are the fraction of each week in Ramadan, its last ten nights, the first ten days of Dhul Hijjah, the year-end period (26 to 31 December) and the Giving Tuesday and Black Friday days.
Robustness: elasticity of new Gaza donors and of Gaza giving (value)
| Specification | New donors, news | New donors, Wikipedia | Value, news | Value, Wikipedia |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Main model (95 weeks) | 0.81*** | 0.42*** | 0.48** | 0.33*** |
| Season weeks removed (77 weeks) | 0.98*** | 0.51*** | 0.59*** | 0.35*** |
| Attention one week earlier | 0.63*** | 0.36*** | 0.36** | 0.30*** |
| Attention two weeks earlier | 0.43** | 0.17* | 0.22* | 0.15* |
| 2025 only (52 weeks) | 0.57*** | 0.14 | 0.10 | −0.11* |
| 2026 only (43 weeks) | 0.32* | 0.26* | 0.36* | 0.38*** |
| Week-over-week changes | 0.61*** | 0.24* | 0.44* | 0.18 |
| No controls except calendar | 1.01*** | 0.53*** | 0.65*** | 0.42*** |
Swipe sideways to see every column.
* p < 0.05, ** p < 0.01, *** p < 0.001. Lagged estimates are smaller and partly reflect attention persisting from one week to the next; in week-over-week changes no lag beyond the same week is significant. The new-donor result holds in every specification; the result for the value of giving does not hold within 2025 alone, which is consistent with the product changes described above.
