Handwritten signs, weary smiles: Gaza thanks a woman from Kerala

Thiruvananthapuram: In the dust of southern Gaza, where the fight for drinking water has become as urgent as the air itself, an unlikely act of generosity rolled in on a battered lorry. It carried three thousand litres of clean water, an amount that sounds technical on paper, but for two hundred and fifty families stripped of almost everything, it meant survival. The truck did not come from an aid convoy or a government grant. It came because a woman in Kerala, an artist named Sreerashmi, decided she could not look away.

The idea did not spring from a think tank or a policy desk; it was born of the simplest of reckonings. Gaza’s water pipes had collapsed, leaving people thirsty in the most literal, brutal sense. Seeing this, Sreerashmi, who founded the Koot Community back home, gathered her friends and said: we will send water. “When we understood how severe the shortage was,” she explained quietly, “this seemed the only thing left to do. My heart overflows with gratitude for those who shared their love for Palestine.”

What arrived in Gaza was not just a truck, but a message stitched together in human effort. A video clip later reached her: children crowding around, women waving, the sound of voices trying to carry across a broken sky. They held up signs, hand-scribbled and crooked on cardboard: “Thanks to Sreerashmi and friends from Kerala, India.” Their smiles were faint, worn down by months of struggle, but unmistakably sincere.

In that moment, a thread of solidarity stretched from Kerala’s coast to Gaza’s rubble,an invisible line between two communities who might never meet in person, yet recognised each other’s humanity.

For Sreerashmi, this one truck was not an isolated gesture but part of a continuing effort. Scroll through her social media pages and you won’t see glossy campaigns or slogans; you’ll find stories. A father who can’t afford bread, a child in need of medicine, a grandmother waiting for blankets. She doesn’t only ask for donations, she builds trust. People across continents read her words, sense her honesty, and send what little they can, often from wages that were hard-earned.

Each time, she answers back with evidence: a short film clip, a photograph, a thank-you scrawled in Arabic, sometimes just a weary smile caught on camera. These updates travel further than she probably realises, forming a small circle of belief.

The comments under her posts are not merely digital nods; they are fragments of solidarity stitched together in cyberspace. It is the kind of labour rarely acknowledged, emotional, moral, and deeply political. And it shows that one determined person, far removed from the centres of power, can still cut through the cruelty of blockade and bureaucracy to bring water where it is most needed.