5 Ways to Help Families Facing Winter Hardship This Season

Every morning, Fouza wakes to the weight of being both a mother and sole provider for her three young children. Inside her fragile tent in a Syrian refugee camp, she feeds them with whatever she can earn selling plastic collected from garbage around the camp. Winter brings an impossible choice: spend what little she has on food, or on fuel to keep her children alive. 

When Zakat Foundation of America's team reached Fouza's family with a heater and fuel, it was a light of warmth in the cold darkness that surrounded her. 

Winter doesn't pause for crisis. For millions of families in Palestine, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, and Lebanon, the cold season is arriving on top of displacement, hunger, and homes that no longer exist. A tent offers little protection when temperatures drop below freezing, and for vulnerable segments of society such as children, the elderly, and newly displaced families, that combination can be life-threatening. 

But there is light in the darkness of these winter months. Here are five concrete ways to help and what your support makes possible. 

1. Provide Emergency Shelter and Winterization Packages 

In Gaza, Palestine more than 100,000 tents have entered since the ceasefire, but winter storms and rain are accelerating their deterioration, with shelter teams struggling to keep pace with replacement needs. In Syria, families displaced by over a decade of crisis are relying on insulation materials and winterization kits just to make damaged or makeshift shelters survivable. 

Our winter packages provide blankets, coats, coal, firewood, heaters, and more to families in displacement sites, replacing what winter destroys before it becomes a life-threatening gap. 

2. Provide Food and Nutrition Support 

Hunger and cold compound each other. In Afghanistan, 17.4 million people are facing crisis-level food insecurity, and nearly 5 million of them are at emergency levels. In Yemen, more than 2.3 million children under five are acutely malnourished. A body already weakened by hunger has far less ability to withstand freezing temperatures. 

Your support will bring nourishment, warmth, and security to families facing the winter without knowing where their next meal will come from.  

3. Support Displaced and Refugee Families Directly 

Lebanon alone has seen over one million people displaced since March 2026, on top of the 4.1 million already in need before that escalation, with many of them being Syrian and Palestinian refugees displaced for a second or third time, like Fouza. Families are sleeping in cars, schools, and informal settlements with no heating and no end date in sight. 

Your contribution puts resources directly in the hands of families who know their own needs best. 

4. Protect Children and Orphans from the Cold 

Children are always the most physically vulnerable to cold-related illness and hypothermia, and in these five countries, they're also often the least protected. Winterization assistance in Gaza, Palestine, has already reached hundreds of children with clothing and winter shoes, but the need far outpaces what's been distributed. For infants like Fouza's youngest, even one freezing night without warmth can be dangerous. 

You can help ensure that the youngest and most vulnerable aren't an afterthought. 

5. Give Zakat and Make It Count Where It's Needed Most 

For Muslims, winter relief is a powerful and valid use of Zakat when it reaches eligible recipients, such as displaced families, the poor, and those in acute need who meet the criteria under most scholarly interpretations. Giving Zakat during such a season means your obligation directly becomes someone else's survival. 

This winter, somewhere in a refugee camp, a mother like Fouza is making the same impossible choice: food or fuel, warmth or hunger. Her children are waiting to see which one wins. 

Give now and bring warmth to a family who has nothing between them and the cold.