Seedlings from the Seeds of Resilience initiative amid destruction in north Gaza. Credit: Bisan Okasha
By Dawn Clancy
UNITED NATIONS, Oct 29 2024 – It was two weeks before October 7—when Hamas attacked Israel—that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood behind the rostrum in the United Nations General Assembly hall clutching a crude map of what he called the “new Middle East,” a visual that erased the land of Palestine.
A year later, Israel’s retaliatory war in Gaza has accelerated, including the destruction of Palestine’s agricultural lands, tipping Netanyahu’s vision of a Middle East without Palestine closer to reality.
According to a recent report by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations (FAO), “as of September 1st, 2024, 67.6 percent of Gaza’s cropland has been damaged,” and much of its agricultural infrastructure, including “greenhouses, agricultural wells and solar panels,” has been destroyed.
“There is no agricultural sector anymore,” said Hani Al Ramlawi, director of operations for the Palestinian Agricultural Development Association (PARC). Ramlawi is from Gaza City but relocated to Egypt six months after the conflict began.
Ramwali told IPS that over the past year, no agricultural supplies have made it into the Strip. Ongoing water and electricity shortages have made fuel, used to power generators and solar panels, too expensive and caused the cost of produce in local markets to soar. In the north of Gaza, Ramlawi said one kilo of potatoes, roughly two pounds, costs $80, a kilo of tomatoes around $90 and one kilo of garlic is $200, and the prices fluctuate daily. Less than 10 percent of farmers have access to their land, and the soil is “diseased” due to ongoing military activities.
Everyone in Gaza is “food insecure,” Ramlawi said. Additionally, the International Labor Organization (ILO), a UN agency, estimates that after a year of war, Gaza’s unemployment rate has skyrocketed to 80 percent.
Seedlings waiting to be distributed to home gardens in displacement camps in north Gaza. Credit: Bisan Okasha
A new Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report has found that between Sept. and Oct. 2024, 1.84 million or 90 percent of people across the Gaza Strip are experiencing crisis levels of food insecurity. “The risk of famine persists across the whole Gaza Strip,” the report added. “Given the recent surge in hostilities, there are growing concerns that this worst-case scenario may materialize.”
Starvation in Gaza, in the context of conflict, is not unique—a group of UN experts published a statement on Oct. 17 warning that “97 percent of Sudan’s IDPs” are facing severe levels of hunger due to “starvation tactics” implemented by the warring parties—but what is different about Gaza, said Michael Fakhri, the UN’s special rapporteur on the right to food, is the “speed” and the “intensity” at which starvation has spread across the Strip.
“This is the fastest instance of starvation we’ve ever seen in modern history,” said Fakhri. “How is Israel able to starve 2.3 million people so quickly and so completely? It’s almost like they pushed a button or flipped a switch.”
What is happening in Gaza, according to Fakhri, is not entirely a humanitarian crisis brought on by prolonged armed conflict but rather a byproduct of decades of illegal land grabs, forced displacement, punitive economic policies and the physical destruction of Palestinian croplands—whether by bulldozers or ever-widening military buffer zones—by the Israeli government. Practices that began in the late nineteenth century, when the first wave of European Jews emigrated to Palestine, long before the State of Israel was established in 1948.
“There’s a consistent through line” that predates the horrors of October 7, said Fakhri. “What is happening today is not new,” he added, or limited to the Gaza Strip.
Relatedly, in response to Fakhri’s latest report examining food and starvation in Palestine, Israeli Ambassador to the UN Danny Danon sent a letter of complaint to Secretary-General António Guterres on October 17, calling on him to retract Fakhri’s “disgraceful” and antisemitic report.
Meanwhile in the West Bank, according to Ubai Al-Aboudi, executive director of the Bisan Center for Research and Development—a Palestinian think tank based in Ramallah—the destruction of crop lands and the targeting of farmers, primarily by Israeli settlers, is “systematic.”
“Now is olive season,” Al-Aboudi told IPS. “And we have this tradition; almost all Palestinian families in the West Bank have their olive trees that they go to in the olive picking season.” But with increased settler attacks, villagers now coordinate, Al-Aboudi said, and harvest collectively to protect their lands, their farmers and one another.
According to estimates from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), as of Oct. 7, 2023, over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed, close to 100,000 injured and 1.9 million have been displaced. (OCHA relies on Gaza’s Ministry of Health for casualty figures.) However, a recent report from The Lancet, a weekly medical journal, suggests that the number of dead in Gaza is likely much higher.
While an official tally of the number of farmers killed in the Strip is not available, members of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), a Palestinian NGO in Gaza, estimate that since Oct. 7, no fewer than 500 farmers out of roughly 30,000 have been killed.
“You know, the farmers and their families are experiencing the same as what we are witnessing for all the population,” said Mahmoud Alsaqqa in a phone interview with IPS. Alsaqqa is Oxfam’s food security and livelihood lead. He is based in Deir Al-Balah.
But, for the remaining farmers, accessing their lands, most of which are located on the eastern edge of the Strip next to the Israeli border, means risking death or sustaining life-altering injuries. “They become an easy target for the military,” said Alsaqqa. And when farmers are killed, their decade’s worth of agricultural knowledge and know-how dies with them.
“There is significant concern about the challenge of rebuilding the knowledge base in Gaza,” UAWC told IPS. “Many universities have been destroyed, and this creates a major fear regarding the re-establishment of academic and agricultural expertise in the region.”
Still, despite ongoing hostilities and sharp decreases in the availability of humanitarian aid, since Oct. 7, Alsaqqa with Oxfam said that more Palestinians are relying on urban or home gardening to feed their families and others in need.
Before the war, Bisan Okasha’s home garden in the Jabalia camp in northern Gaza was bursting with olive, palm and banana trees, citrus fruits, grapes and mint and basil seedlings. However, after Oct. 7, when her home and garden were destroyed and the threat of famine loomed large, Okasha’s father, determined to rebuild, cleared their land of debris and planted 70 eggplant seedlings on a mound of soil that covered the rubbled chunks of their home.
The effort was “successful,” said Okasha in a series of texts with IPS. The experience left her feeling inspired, and soon after, Okasha, despite being displaced three times, created Seeds of Resilience, a collaborative, community-driven initiative designed to revive and establish home gardens in the north by providing and planting seedlings and seeds for free. So far, Okasha and her team—all volunteers—have planted eggplant, cauliflower, chili, and peppers in multiple home gardens.
“My dad’s personal effort to change the reality we were living in is what gave me the belief that I can create change in my entire community and take a real, practical step to prepare the people in Northern Gaza for any future crisis that may threaten their lives,” said Okasha.
“Wars and disasters in this world show no mercy to souls,” she added.
According to the FAO report, out of the five governorates in Gaza, North Gaza, where the Jabalia camp is located, has the highest proportion of damaged cropland at 78 percent. Khan Younis has the largest amount of damaged agricultural infrastructure—animal shelters, home barns, agricultural houses, and cattle farms—while the Gaza governorate has the largest number of damaged wells, reducing access to water. Relatedly, OCHA estimates that over 70,000 housing units have been destroyed across Gaza.
The Israeli mission to the UN, based in New York, declined to comment on the FAO report, and the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) did not respond.
IPS UN Bureau Report
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