Born and raised in a small college town in the American Midwest, Steve Sosebee knew little about the Middle East growing up, and says he had never met an Arab until he started studying political science at Kent State University. Following a three-week visit to the West Bank and Gaza during his junior year, Sosebee returned to Palestine as a graduate in 1989, this time as a freelance journalist on a mission to write about and raise awareness of the plight of those caught up in the violence of the First Intifada (uprising).

But when he met 10-year-old Mansour - who lost both legs and a hand in an Israeli bomb blast near his home in Hebron - everything changed. 

A news report wouldn’t be enough, realised Sosebee, who found himself steered onto a path that would change his life - and the lives of many others – and lead to the formation of the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), an award-winning humanitarian organisation supporting sick and injured children across the region.

“I saw this child in a wheelchair without legs and I couldn't just write a story about him and walk away,” Sosebee recalls. “I didn’t know what I was doing… but if I didn't do something, who was going to?” 

Three decades later, PCRF is a multinational NGO with chapters in 25 countries. Sosebee, 58, is the president, but he has a CEO, Imad Nassreddin, an advisory board, a global staff of more than 60, and a huge pool of medical volunteers from the US, Canada, Japan, Egypt, France, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and beyond.

Sosebee tells me his inspiring story in the lobby of a hotel in Dubai, a city in which he has, over the years, succeeded in raising millions of dollars from foundations, philanthropists, corporates, and individual donors. “When I first came here in 1995, I didn't know a single person,” he says, recalling how he approached the head of the Chamber of Commerce, explained what PCRF did and asked if anyone might be able to help fund him. Sosebee’s boldness paid off and he was able to win over local donors.

In 2008, PCRF partnered with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Humanitarian & Charity Establishment to bring children to the UAE to be fitted with prosthetic limbs. And more recently, in 2021, UAE philanthropist Muna Al Gurg, donated US$1m to a new neonatal intensive care unit at Khalil Suleiman Hospital in the Palestinian city of Jenin. The Emirati businesswoman made the donation in tribute to her late mother, Soraya Ali Kazim, who had passed away 18 months earlier.

Speaking at the time, Al Gurg, who is a member of PCRF’s advisory board, said: “My mother knew Steve personally and always supported him in the work he did. I remember every year he'd bring the annual report and she'd go through it diligently, so the donation has a very personal meaning to it.”

A key force in PCRF’s early fundraising in the Gulf was Huda Al Masri, a Palestinian social worker Sosebee had met at the YMCA in Jerusalem, where she worked with injured children.

“The minute she walked through the door, I fell in love,” he says. The couple married and had two children but in 2009, Huda sadly died from Leukaemia. “For the 17 years [we were] together, it was a true love story. Then she died, leaving me with two girls to raise, and the organisation that we had built together to run.”

A grief-stricken Sosebee moved back to the West Bank with his daughters, Deema and Jenna, and poured himself into PCRF. “That's how I dealt with my grief,” he explains. “It was just through my work… Spending all my time helping other kids and building this organisation and raising my daughters.”

Bethlehem’s Huda Al Masri Paediatric Cancer Department, the city’s first public cancer centre for children, which opened in 2013, was Sosebee’s and PCRF’s tribute to Huda. Funded by philanthropists from all over the world, including the Gulf, the unit continues today to offer life-saving treatment to thousands of Palestinian children.

Sosebee continues to live in the West Bank - where he has remarried, to Zeena Salman, a Sudanese-American paediatric oncologist, with whom he has a third daughter, Layla – and he has big plans for PCRF. These include expanding the neonatal intensive care unit in Gaza and refurbishing the paediatric departments in Hebron and Jericho. 

From the outside, the geo-political complexity of Palestine with its ever-growing humanitarian needs, feels a far cry from his American Midwest birthplace. But Sosebee says he grew up exposed to activism at a young age as the son of a nurse and a schoolteacher, who were involved in fighting for social justice and against racist housing segregation laws impacting African Americans.

He was a teenager in 1970 when the National Guard fatally shot students protesting against the war in Vietnam in his hometown of Kent, so when he saw the news of the First Intifada a few years later, it very much resonated.

Sosebee adds: “Because I grew up with that legacy of soldiers shooting unarmed demonstrators ... I started to want to understand and read about the Middle East and understand the conflict more.”