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A Los Angeles concert raised $5.5 million on Saturday for relief organisations working in Palestine and Sudan. The Los Angeles Times previously reported that the concert raised $5.4m. The concert’s co-host, Palestinian-American supermodel Bella Hadid, took a moment to thank attendees and performers with a heartfelt note on Instagram.

She thanked Sudanese-Canadian artist Mustafa the Poet for organising the concert and actor Pedro Pascal for hosting it alongside her, calling them both “dear friends”.

Talking about the event, Hadid said she saw “love in action” when she looked around the venue. People, she said, chose to show up, “not just for music, not just for community, but for humanity”.

The model said she was moved at the sight and that she and Pascal were honoured to have been able to play a part in it. “Even remembering is a protest,” she wrote about the loss suffered by people in Sudan and Palestine.

Hadid went on to talk about the organisations that benefited from the concert, the Sudanese American Physicians Association (SAPA) and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF).

Fundraising for the PCRF, she said, was a “cause that is deeply personal to me”. She added that the organisation had done the “heroic task” of supporting 6,000 orphans in Gaza, providing 21 million litres of clean water to families and evacuating “hundreds of children” out of the war-torn territory — some of whom attended the concert as well.

SAPA, meanwhile, “mobilises Sudanese medical professionals in the US to support healthcare delivery and capacity-building efforts in Sudan.”

Hadid said the organisation has served over 100,000 children under the age of five and actively supports over 100 hospitals with “medical missions, training, supplies, and emergency response during crises and conflicts”.

The Artists for Aid concert put big names like Shawn Mendes, Chappell Roan and Clairo to its Los Angeles stage alongside musicians, poets and speakers with ancestral ties to Sudan and Palestine.

While such events have taken place to support relief efforts in Gaza, this was likely the first such event to assist aid workers in Sudan.

It comes during a period of a ceasefire signed in October, although Israeli strikes continue to kill people in the contested region. Amnesty International maintains that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza.

Sudan, meanwhile, has been in the grips of a devastating civil war between the government and the Rapid Support Forces militia since April 2023. Attacks earlier this month in the country’s Darfur region killed 114 in what the United Nations has called a “war of atrocities”.

While there are no definitive figures for how many people have been killed in the conflict, the figure is said to be in the tens of thousands, with more than 11 million people displaced.