How to Donate to Gaza from France: Tax Receipts, the Law, and the Routes That Reach People

If you live in France and want to help people in Gaza, three questions usually come before the first euro. Is it legal? Will I get a reçu fiscal? And will the money reach a family, or vanish somewhere between my bank and a tent?

Here is the short answer. Giving to humanitarian relief in Gaza from France is legal, provided the money does not go to a person or entity covered by asset-freeze measures. A reçu fiscal, and the income-tax reduction that comes with it, exists only when you give to an eligible organisation of general interest. Gifts to an individual, a personal fundraiser or a crypto wallet do not produce one. So the real decision is a trade-off: tax relief through a registered charity, or a more direct route where you check the trail yourself.

We should be clear about ourselves from the start. FundGaza is a personal humanitarian initiative run from inside the Gaza Strip, not a licensed charity. We cannot issue a reçu fiscal, and we would rather you know that before you choose than after.

Three routes from France, side by side

Most donors in France end up choosing between three paths. Each one answers a different priority.

Route	Reçu fiscal?	How you pay	What you can check yourself	Main limitation
Registered French or EU charity with a Gaza programme	Yes, if the organisation is eligible	Card, transfer, direct debit	Annual reports, programme updates, labels	Funds are pooled; you rarely know which family was helped
Crowdfunding campaign (for example GoFundMe)	No, for a personal fundraiser	Card or PayPal	Organiser identity, updates, platform protections	Platform fees and payout timing depend on the platform
Direct USDT on the TRON network (TRC-20)	No	Crypto wallet	The transfer itself, publicly, on Tronscan	You handle the technical steps, and a mistake can be permanent

None of these is right for everyone. If the tax reduction matters to your budget, route one is the obvious fit. If you want to see where a specific gift goes, routes two and three give you more visibility, at the cost of the receipt.

Is it legal to donate to Gaza from France?

Yes. Humanitarian giving is lawful, and many people in France send help to Gaza through charities, community collections and family networks. The legal line is about who receives the money. France applies European Union and national asset-freeze regimes, and making funds available to a listed person or organisation is prohibited. The French Treasury publishes a national register of frozen assets that anyone can consult.

In practice, staying on the right side of that line comes down to a few habits:

• Give to someone you can identify. A named organisation, a campaign with a visible organiser, or an initiative that explains who runs it and how it spends.
• Avoid any campaign that uses political, factional or armed-group language. Humanitarian work should talk about water, food, shelter and medicine, nothing else.
• Keep your own records. Screenshots of the campaign page, your payment confirmation, and for crypto the transaction link.
• Answer your bank plainly if it asks. Banks sometimes question transfers linked to conflict zones. A factual reply such as food and water aid for families is normal and reasonable.

This is general information, not legal advice. If you are sending large sums or acting for an association, speak to a lawyer who works on sanctions compliance.

The reçu fiscal: what you can claim and what you can't

French income tax offers a reduction for donations to organisations of general interest. The standard rate is 66 per cent of the amount given, within a limit of 20 per cent of your taxable income, and any excess can be carried forward over the following five years. A higher rate applies to organisations that provide free meals, care or housing to people in difficulty, up to an annual ceiling. That ceiling has been revised recently, so check the figure for your tax year on impots.gouv.fr rather than relying on an article, including this one.

A simple example: if an eligible charity receives 100 euros from you and the 66 per cent rate applies, your tax falls by 66 euros and the gift costs you 34. Without a valid receipt, the reduction can be refused on inspection, so keep the document the organisation sends you.

Organisations established in another EU or EEA country can sometimes qualify, but conditions apply and the rules are technical. Ask the organisation directly whether a gift from a French taxpayer gives a right to the reduction, and ask to see how it handles that.

What does not qualify:

• money sent to an individual or a family;
• personal crowdfunding campaigns, even on well-known platforms;
• crypto sent directly to a person or a personal initiative such as ours.

We go deeper into the logic, country by country, in our guide is a donation to Gaza tax deductible. The principle is the same everywhere: tax authorities reward gifts to organisations they recognise, not gifts to people.

Route 1: giving through a registered charity

If you want the reçu fiscal, this is your route. A few checks make it safer:

1. Ask whether it issues a reçu fiscal and under which status. Most serious charities answer in a sentence.
2. Look for Gaza-specific detail. A real programme names what it does (water trucking, food parcels, medical supplies), where, and with which partners. Vague appeals with stock photos are a warning sign.
3. Read the latest report. Annual accounts and programme updates tell you more than any slogan.
4. Check for independent labels. In France, the Don en Confiance label is one signal that an organisation's governance and fundraising have been reviewed.

The trade-off is control. Your gift joins a pooled budget, part of it covers operating costs, and you usually won't know which household it reached. For many donors that is perfectly acceptable. For others it is the reason they look further.

Route 2: a crowdfunding campaign by card or PayPal

Crowdfunding feels familiar: you pay by card or PayPal, and the platform handles payment protection and refunds under its own terms. On our Ways to Support Gaza Families page we list one GoFundMe campaign, Help Nidal Zomlot Family Rebuild Their Lives (fundraiser for the family of Nidal Zomlot, who runs FundGaza), organised by a family relative based in Brussels. Because the campaign supports our founder's own family, we would rather be plain about it: nobody has independently vetted it, and its only protection is GoFundMe's Donation Protected guarantee, a refund policy that applies across the whole platform rather than a check of this particular fundraiser.

Before giving to any campaign, check who the organiser is, who the beneficiary is, and whether the page posts updates. A personal campaign like this one does not produce a French tax receipt, and platform fees and payout timing are set by the platform, so read its own pages for those details.

Route 3: direct USDT on the TRON network

Some donors in France choose to send USDT, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, over the TRON network (TRC-20). The appeal is visibility: every transfer is written to a public ledger that anyone can open on Tronscan. Bank transfers to private individuals inside Gaza are often not a practical option, and the services that do work change over time, which is why direct crypto has become one of the routes families and small initiatives use. Our full walkthrough is in donate USDT crypto to Gaza; here is what is specific to France.

Buying USDT from France

Use a platform registered or authorised by the AMF, the French financial markets authority, and check the AMF's warning lists before opening an account anywhere. Under the EU's MiCA rules, some platforms have restricted USDT for customers in the European Economic Area, so availability depends on where you hold your account. If USDT is not offered to you on a regulated platform, do not move to an unregulated site to get it. Choose route one or two instead.

Two tax points worth raising with an adviser: accounts held on crypto platforms abroad generally have to be declared each year, and selling or spending crypto you already hold can have tax consequences of its own. Neither question is complicated for a professional, but both are easy to overlook.

Sending and verifying, step by step

1. Copy the receiving address only from the campaign's own page. For FundGaza, that is our crypto donation page. Never use an address sent to you in a private message.
2. Select TRON (TRC-20) as the network. Sending on another network can mean the funds are lost for good.
3. Compare the first and last characters of the pasted address with the one on the page. Clipboard malware exists.
4. Send a small test amount first, then the rest once it arrives.
5. Look at the network fee before confirming. TRON transfers consume network resources paid in TRX, and the cost varies, so your wallet shows it at that moment.
6. Open the transaction on Tronscan. Check that the status shows success, that the token is USDT issued by Tether on TRON, that the receiver matches the campaign's own published wallet, and that the amount is right.

Be clear about what this proves. A Tronscan record shows that money moved from one wallet to another. It does not, by itself, show what was bought or who received it. That second part depends on the campaign's own reporting.

What your donation can pay for

The need is not abstract. The UN humanitarian office describes families queuing daily for trucked drinking water and food rations at about half of minimum caloric requirements, according to the OCHA humanitarian situation report of 22 October 2026. Small, focused projects try to fill part of that gap.

Our current projects are the Water Relief Project, which aims to pay for clean drinking water delivered to displaced families, and the Food Basket Project, which will assemble basic food parcels. FundGaza commits to documenting donations and expenses with photos and receipts in its public transparency log. We prefer small, documented campaigns over large appeals, and you are welcome to read the record before you give anything.

Red flags, whichever route you pick

The same warning signs show up in scams aimed at donors in France, Belgium and beyond:

• A personal fundraiser promising a reçu fiscal. Only eligible organisations can issue one. A promise without a recognised status behind it is either a misunderstanding or a lie.
• A wallet address sent by WhatsApp or direct message that differs from the one published on the campaign's website.
• Pressure to act within minutes, or guilt-heavy messages that discourage questions.
• Requests for gift cards, prepaid vouchers or transfers to a stranger's personal account.
• Claims that every euro arrives instantly with no costs, without any evidence to back them.
• Copied branding from well-known charities on a site with a slightly different name.
• Political or armed-group slogans on a page that says it is humanitarian.

If something feels off, pause. A genuine campaign will still be there tomorrow, and it will be glad you checked.

Zakat and sadaqah from France

Many Muslim donors in France give part of their zakat or sadaqah to Gaza. Whether a particular route meets the conditions of zakat, for example how it reaches eligible recipients, is a question for a scholar or a fatwa body you trust. FundGaza does not issue religious rulings. Keep in mind that zakat and French tax are separate systems: a gift can be valid zakat without giving any right to a tax reduction, and the reverse is also true.

Which route fits you?

If the tax reduction matters, give through a registered charity and keep the receipt. If you want a familiar card payment with platform protection, a crowdfunding campaign whose organiser you can identify is a sensible middle ground. If you are comfortable with a crypto wallet and want to check the transfer yourself, direct USDT is an option, as long as you follow the steps above and accept that there is no receipt.

Whichever you choose, ask questions, keep your records and give to people you can identify. If you would like to support our water and food projects directly, you can donate USDT verified on-chain, or see every option on our page to donate to Gaza now.