The Electronic Intifada 26 April 2024
With barely any cooking gas allowed into Gaza, people have been forced to cut trees for firewood. Here in Deir al-Balah.
APA imagesIn early April, Islam Dukhan, 32, was burning wood in a rudimentary stove he had built out of clay and scrap metal near his house in Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city.
He had got the wood by chopping down a tree near his home. It was, he said, necessary to be able to cook for his two young children and his pregnant wife Shireen.
Shortly after 7 October, Israel prohibited the entry of cooking gas into Gaza. Limited supplies are now being allowed in, but at just 30 percent of the daily average from before 7 October, as per the UN, these fall far short of the needs of Gaza’s 2.3 million people.
As a result, wood has become the main source of fuel for cooking in Gaza.
Islam coped well for the first two months. He had – as many do in Gaza, accustomed as they are to periodic episodes of outsized Israeli violence – stored ample cooking gas in the house.
When it ran out, however, he began foraging the woods east of Rafah, about an hour from his house on foot.
These were the cold months, but he would not be deterred. Shireen and his two daughters, Seela, 1, and Lamees, 3, were all in danger of malnutrition.
Islam’s day in the woods was like a full-time job. He would spend six hours there, cutting branches off olive and citrus trees, before dragging the wood over sandy ground to the main road, where he could load his burden onto a donkey cart.
He was usually accompanied by six others doing the same for the same reason.
Indeed, the woods were filled with hundreds of people cutting down trees. In a month, Islam said, the woods became “barren land.”
The Israeli military accounts for most of the decimation of Gaza’s woodland and farmland, and the extent of the damage Israel has wrought has caused an ecological disaster.
In just one corridor of land, satellite imagery reveals that Israel has cleared more than 17,400 square meters of land of trees and other plant life.
Bellingcat, an online open-source investigation group, using satellite imagery from Planet Labs, found similar clearings of land in at least two other areas of Gaza.
The clearing of agricultural land by warring parties is “strictly forbidden” under the laws of war, the group quoted a Human Rights Watch spokesperson as saying.
Desperation
Islam and those like him, however, have no choice.
And increasingly, they have no choice of type of wood either.
Through experience, Islam found that the wood from olive and citrus trees ignited smoothly and burned longer. But once these trees started to vanish from the woods, he started to use wood from any tree he could find, on the streets, near his house or in the neighborhood.
“There is no longer a specific type we seek. What matters now is to find wood even if it doesn’t stay lit for a long time,” he told The Electronic Intifada.
“We want to cook and eat. We want to heat water and prepare baby milk for my daughter and for my family to take a shower.”
As the trees disappear, finding wood has become another challenge, necessitating other means to start fires. Islam sometimes burns garbage, “just at least to warm the baby milk,” and since he is left with no other options.
“The food being sold in the markets is unaffordable, and I’ve lost my work as a trader by the sea as a result of the fighting,” he said.
“I know [the garbage] is poisonous and could cause respiratory illness for me and my children. But what choice do I have?”
Hiyam Abed, 65, was reduced to tears when she heard that her brothers had been forced to chop down the trees she had cultivated for decades around her family’s three-story building in Gaza City.
Unlike Hiyam, who fled to Rafah, Atef and Aref, her two brothers, had stayed at the family home in Gaza City, despite the intensity of Israel’s genocidal violence there. But when they ran out of fuel and gas, they were left with little choice, not least since Israel is limiting food aid to the northern part of Gaza.
“My brothers asked me to forgive them because they know how much those trees meant to me – that I looked after them day and night for years, just as a mother looks after her children,” Hiyam told The Electronic Intifada.
“They sent me a picture of how the building looks without my trees. It is empty and dark. I felt like they took my soul.”
In addition to the trees surrounding the building, Hiyam had planted a plot of land at the back with many different kinds of trees, including guava, lemon, orange and olive.
Some had been cut down for firewood. The rest had fallen prey to Israel’s bulldozers.
“I inherited my passion for trees from my father who inherited it from his father. Most of our trees are more than 100 years old,” she said.
Burning the furniture
Hiyam did not blame her brothers. She understood that they were doing what they needed to do in order to survive.
“There is nothing to eat. There is no electricity to take a bath in warm water. There is no cooking gas to prepare food. Not even fuel to ignite a fire,” she said.
“There is no life there at all.”
Her brothers also gave some wood to neighbors, they told Hiyam over the phone. But their once luscious orchard was a finite resource.
The wood has run out and now they have been forced to start burning their furniture and even their clothes.
“What should we do once the furniture and clothes are gone? How will we survive then?” an increasingly desperate Aref had asked his sister.
“How long do we have to survive this?”
Still, Palestinians in Gaza are nothing if not resourceful, nothing if not resilient.
Every morning, Said Hassan, 56, goes in search of firewood from under the rubble of destroyed homes in Jabaliya refugee camp in northern Gaza.
He is always accompanied by his 10-year-old grandson Ahmad. They look for bits of wood from the doors or furniture of the many destroyed homes and buildings around them.
Once the man and the boy have collected enough, Said carries what he can on his back to the courtyard of his house, while Ahmad drags as much cardboard as he can to be used to ignite the wood.
“When we arrive home, we build a fire and announce it to everyone in the neighborhood so anyone who has food they want to cook can bring it. Hundreds of people often come,” Said told The Electronic Intifada over the phone.
On some occasions, Said gets wood from trees, but that is increasingly rare. Most of the trees have simply disappeared from the north.
At other times, he said, when their search is fruitless, they forage from homes that have only been partially destroyed.
“We always leave a letter on the wall asking the owners for forgiveness, and to explain that we are forced to take their clothes and furniture or we’d die.”
Rakan Abed is a reporter and video producer based in Gaza.
Khuloud Rabah Sulaiman is a journalist living in Gaza.
