Photo by WAFA on Wikimedia Commons

The Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), founded in 1991, is a 501(c)(3) humanitarian nonprofit focused on providing free, specialized critical care to ill and injured children in Gaza and the West Bank. The need for critical medical intervention from third-party nonprofits reflects the failure of local and, more significantly, national governments to resolve these crises. The organization’s website features donation opportunities alongside images of Palestinian children and volunteers, not only to elicit an emotional response from users but also to provide candid insight into the organization’s operations, reflecting Hallsby’s definition of representation: organizing discourse so that viewers see a crisis in a particular way. Furthermore, transparency is demonstrated through prominently displayed accreditations and high ratings from third-party evaluators such as Charity Navigator. The site also provides easy access to Form 990 tax documents and other financial information under the “About Us” tab in the header, where donors encounter what Hunsinger calls the assemblage of people and institutions behind the site. PCRF maintains a presence across a wide range of social media platforms, including Instagram, X, Facebook, TikTok, and others. While this presence increases the organization’s reach, it also presents several drawbacks. As Max Fisher argues on the “Offline” podcast, choices made to satisfy profit-driven algorithms can undermine individual goals, in this case, humanitarian goals in the pursuit of influence.

Outlets such as CNN, the BBC, Al Jazeera, NPR, and Reuters not only cover information from PCRF but also treat its staff as primary sources on conditions inside Gaza and the West Bank. This is evident in their routine citation of PCRF doctors and coordinators, with one of the highest-profile examples being CNN’s 2021 report on the airstrikes against the PCRF’s Gaza office, which quoted its founder, Steve Sosebee. In this relationship, PCRF functions as a source of primary, first-person material on which journalistic accounts are built. This credibility did not require manufacturing by PCRF; it was earned through the organization’s intimate experience with the conditions and people in the region. Its credibility is further reinforced by third-party evaluators who verify PCRF’s claims, reflecting accountability and an appeal to ethos. PCRF leverages this credibility and expertise to contribute to rhetoric, defined by Hallsby as the active and retroactive organization of discourse, thereby reorienting public perspectives toward understanding and obligation.