Food sovereignty is a matter of life and death in Gaza, where Israel has been deliberately destroying Palestinians’ ability to sustain themselves.

For Yousef Abu Rabee, from Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza, farming ran in his blood. He had been doing it from a very young age, the 24-year-old said with pride when interviewed by The Electronic Intifada in September.

But over the past year, many farmers in Gaza like Abu Rabee have had to abandon their land, crops and way of life due to Israeli bombing and evacuation orders. Instead of producing their own food, they, like everyone else in Gaza, have become dependent on the little humanitarian aid allowed in as Israel deliberately destroys Palestinians’ self-sufficiency.

And they have also become the targets and victims of Israel’s genocide.

On 21 October, Abu Rabee was killed in a drone strike near his nursery in Beit Lahiya, where an Israeli extermination campaign is underway. A source with direct knowledge said that three other young men, all of them civilians, were killed alongside Abu Rabee.

In the days before he was killed, Abu Rabee posted a short video on his Instagram account documenting him and another person ducking for cover on a narrow street. They had come under fire while distributing parcels of food in bright blue plastic bags, the gunshots audible in the video.

After the announcement of his death, a much more upbeat video of Abu Rabee went viral. In it, he pays tribute to the strength and resilience of his people who are “insisting on staying, planting and wanting to rebuild again” despite Israel’s siege and destruction of northern Gaza:

Echoes of 1948

Before the genocide began last year, Abu Rabee was pursuing a degree in agriculture from Gaza City’s Al-Azhar University, now reduced to rubble.

On 8 October 2023, heavy bombing forced Abu Rabee and his family to flee from Beit Lahiya to Jabaliya refugee camp and then to Gaza City. The family moved no fewer than 10 times, staying with family and friends as well as at schools turned into shelters and hospitals.

The displacement of Abu Rabee and his family in Gaza, where the majority of the population are refugees from lands now fully controlled by Israel, echoed the initial mass displacement of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948.

During that expulsion more than 75 years ago, former landlords became dependent on food aid and lived in tents for years.

The Gaza District of historic Palestine – made of three cities and 54 agricultural villages, most of them destroyed in 1948 – was reduced from some 1,111 square kilometers to 365 square kilometers – around 20 percent of its previous area. This is what we know today as the Gaza Strip.

Palestinian farmers who owned and lived off of their land ended up as refugees in eight camps in Gaza.

The American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker organization with which this author works, helped build these refugee camps. AFSC provided aid to refugees for around two years before the United Nations created UNRWA to serve the needs of uprooted Palestinians until they were able to return to their lands and homes – a right that Israel still prevents Palestinians from exercising.

The UN agency continues to provide aid to millions of Palestinian refugees in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

After the dispossession of historic Palestine in 1948, many Palestinian farmers were forced to change professions as they no longer owned land to cultivate. Instead, they learned trades that supported their families in this new reality, including construction, carpentry and auto mechanics.

In 1948, the population of Gaza tripled, and the coastal enclave’s limited agricultural land decreased as the population grew.

In intervening years, Israeli access restrictions – often enforced with lethal fire – further reduced the lands on which Palestinians cultivated food in Gaza.

During the 2000s until the start of the genocide last year, the Israeli military razed cropland along Gaza’s periphery and used crop dusters to spray herbicide on cultivated areas to create a “buffer zone” to increase its soldiers’ field of vision.

Before the genocide, people in Gaza turned to other means of production, such as rooftop gardens.

Even though Gaza hugs the Mediterranean Sea, and fishing is a traditional Palestinian industry, freshwater fish farms became a thriving business in the territory due to the land, sea and air blockade imposed by Israel in 2007.

For years, Israel has severely restricted Palestinians’ access to Gaza’s coastal waters, and many fishers have been arrested, injured and killed by the Israeli navy while trying to make a living.

Impossible conditions

While producing food under Israeli occupation has never been easy, now it’s all but impossible.

Palestinians in Gaza, who were able to produce much of their own food before October 2023, are therefore struggling to find the bare minimum to survive.

As of October last year, Gaza’s population stood at 2.3 million Palestinians. Since then, the Israeli military has killed at least 42,718 people in Gaza, with thousands more missing under the rubble. Another 100,280 people have been injured, according to the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza.

Hundreds of those killed and injured were farmers who greatly contributed to Gaza’s food basket, despite immense challenges. Surviving farmers have faced impossible conditions in order to cultivate what remains of Gaza’s crops.

“We used to cultivate 20 to 25 dunums in the past,” said Raja Jaber, a farmer from Deir al-Balah in central Gaza, but now he is cultivating only five dunums – around 1.25 acres. The most serious challenge faced by farmers, according to him, is “the lack of seeds and pesticides.”

Palestinian farmers in Gaza who are able to plant are growing fruits and vegetables that can be harvested after a short period of a few months, such as squash and eggplants. They do not have the luxury of planting seeds that require plowing the land a longer growing time until it’s ready to harvest and consume.

Rising costs make farming prohibitive, forcing some farmers like Jaber to cultivate a smaller area of land than they did in the past.

For example, farming equipment requires diesel, which is now hard to find, and when found, very expensive.

Electricity-generated irrigation is no longer available after Israel cut off the supply of electricity to Gaza in early October last year. Generators need around 20 liters of diesel to operate, an amount that is too difficult to find and too expensive to afford.

“There is no electricity, so I use gas and diesel generators to water my fields,” Jaber said. “The price of gas and diesel is too high. At one point, I couldn’t find gas or diesel even at high prices.”

Some farmers in Gaza were already using solar-powered irrigation systems after the Israeli blockade beginning in 2007 caused chronic fuel shortages. But solar power cannot fully supplement electricity.

“Solar panels, when available, are helpful,” according to Jaber. “But they are not accessible for many farmers because the prices of solar panels also skyrocketed after 7 October.”

Land bulldozed and polluted

Meanwhile, Gaza’s already reduced fertile land has been razed by the Israeli military to create “buffer zones,” or it has been buried under massive amounts of rubble, preventing any form of agriculture.

“The majority of agricultural land in the north was bulldozed,” according to Jaber.

He added that the Israeli military destroyed greenhouses when it invaded agricultural communities in the northern and eastern areas of Gaza.

The displacement of people onto farmland has also created new challenges for farmers who cannot access any land in Gaza’s east and limited land in the west. New encampments for displaced people have been built on agricultural land, some of which is being used – out of necessity – for makeshift toilets. Some produce has been stolen amid the context of famine before it could be sold at market.

Further complicating things for farmers, the lack of access to pesticides, most of which were imported from Israel before October 2023, makes it extremely difficult to prevent crop-damaging infestations. And Gaza’s soil has been contaminated with heavy metals and toxic chemicals due to ongoing bombing.

The closure of many livestock farms and the death of animals due to Israeli bombings, as well as the lack of animal feed and inability to provide proper care, has seriously reduced the amount of manure available for agricultural use.

Farmers who depended on manure, mostly bought from animal farms in northern Gaza, have no alternative due to Israel’s total closure of the crossings connecting Gaza with the rest of the world.

Planting seeds of self-sufficiency

The destruction of the agricultural sector in Gaza has brought food sovereignty to the fore. It is impossible to establish any form of sovereign food production in Gaza so long as Israel controls the crossings and fishing waters and decides what is or is not allowed in or out of the territory.

Some local and international nongovernmental organizations, particularly the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, are supporting farmers by providing them with pesticides, pipes, seeds and plants.

But what farmers ultimately need, they say, is the ability to support themselves unencumbered by Israeli violence and restrictions.

“It’s difficult to establish sovereign Palestinian agriculture independent from Israel’s occupation, as the inputs to agricultural production are imported from outside, which is also the case for raw materials,” said Mohammed al-Harazeen, an engineer from Gaza specializing in agricultural production.

Due to Israel targeting infrastructure and restricting the import of seeds and pesticides, al-Harazeen said that Palestinians need to produce locally the materials necessary for an independent agricultural sector.

This “is impossible during an ongoing genocide,” he said.

But even at present, in seemingly impossible conditions, farmers in Gaza like Abu Rabee have been doing what they can to produce food.

“Five months into the war and after the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Beit Lahiya, my family and I were able to go back to our farmland,” he said one month before he was killed.

At the time they returned to Beit Lahiya, they had been surviving on foraged plants and food aid that trickled in from the south.

People like them, who were starving, were being massacred, and Abu Rabee and his brother wanted to save lives by returning to farming “and to eat from our own production,” he said.

“First, we planted on our roof,” growing mulukhiya and squash that Abu Rabee and his family ate and shared with others.

“After that, we started a plant nursery,” he said. “We got the seeds from the remains of what we planted in the past. We took pepper and eggplant seeds and replanted them.”

Although half of the brothers’ home collapsed due to Israeli bombing, after removing the rubble they built their nursery where their garden once grew.

They started with 45,000 plants at the nursery and provided badly needed vegetables to Palestinians in their area. Other farmers, encouraged by the brothers’ success, returned to farming, little by little.

“Having a plant nursery at home and some seeds saved me and my family,” Abu Rabee said. “We were able to produce 200,000 plants with the help of other farmers, growing peppers, eggplants, pumpkin, beans, cucumbers and squash.”

“At the beginning, our market prices were high,” Abu Rabee added. “But as production increased, we were able to reduce the cost. Our goal is supporting our people.”

That Palestinian farmers were even able to plant during a genocide is a marvel, and the loss of any food producer is devastating to society as a whole while Israel uses starvation as a weapon of war.

The killing of a young farmer like Abu Rabee, who provided a lifeline to his community, leaves other Palestinians in Gaza’s north, where almost no food has been allowed in since the beginning of the month, much more vulnerable.

Yousef M. Aljamal is Gaza Coordinator at the Palestine Activism Program at the American Friends Service Committee. Aljamal holds a doctorate in Middle Eastern Studies, is a Palestinian refugee from Gaza and is a senior non-resident scholar at the Hashim Sani Center for Palestine Studies, University of Malaya, Malaysia. He has contributed to a number of books on Palestine, including Gaza Writes Back and Light in Gaza.

Tags

• Yousef Abu Rabee
• agriculture
• Beit Lahiya
• Gaza genocide
• Mohammed al-Harazeen

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