Youssef Saqr Abu Rabie, a twenty-four year old farmer from Beit Lahia, returned home with his family from the Jabalia refugee camp in early March, once the Israeli forces had retreated. There, he saw “indescribable destruction” of his city.
Determined to reestablish life in the ruined North Gaza town, Abu Rabie harvested seeds from the parched remains of cucumbers, peppers, eggplant, and squash. The fruit, left to rot and dry in the bombed-out fields, still held the germ for a future crop.
He planted those seeds, along with mulukhiyya, a variety of jute plant used to make the dish of the same name. He showed me pictures of his crops: mulukhiyya planted in six neat rows per bed, and black globe eggplants reflecting light from the sky above. Their purple flowers portended future harvests.
In the last month, when Israel refocused its brutality on the north of Gaza, I became even more worried for Abu Rabie’s safety than I had already been. It was weeks since we’d spoken. I reached out to him, sending the message at midday Eastern Standard Time. I had found that Abu Rabie was more likely to respond quickly when night had fallen in Gaza.
He wrote me back almost right away. “Our agricultural land was bulldozed,” he said. I was shocked—why should I have been. As the bloody weeks in October drew on, I checked in with Abu Rabie often. Momentary relief would come over me when I saw the messages were delivered, and then read, the blue checkmarks on WhatsApp letting me know he was alive. When I asked him on 14 October how he was, his response was clipped. “Bad day,” he wrote. A few days later, the answer was the same.
Most of our communications up until October were centered around agriculture. Coming from a farming background myself, we connected through a shared love for growing food. In the last month, the tone of our conversations changed. Abu Rabie’s fields had been destroyed by Israeli bulldozers. Israeli forces had killed 640 Palestinians in north Gaza in seventeen days. He was trying merely to survive.
On 19 October, after messaging back and forth a while, I decided to ask him about the current agricultural situation, expecting that all efforts had ceased. I was stunned to hear that he had planted again. This time, on a smaller scale, he was growing lettuce, arugula, parsley, spinach, radishes, and turnips. I wished him a successful crop. He wrote back, “Inshallah”.
Israel killed Abu Rabie on Monday, 21 October. He was a light for Gaza and the whole world.
Polluted Soils
Abu Rabie was resolute. He was also realistic. Anyone in his position would have been. “Yes, there is still determination to cultivate,” he told me in August, “but we are now lacking the requirements for agriculture. There are no seeds, fertilizers, or pesticides. Within days, everything will end, and this will stop us from continuing to work.” While farmers in Gaza can glean seeds from fallow fields, abandoned when the IOF rains down bombs, they are not able to access other vital inputs. Growers do not typically produce fertilizers and pesticides on their farms, especially those caught in the matrix of modern agrichemical farming. They purchase them on the open market, a market which, in Gaza, has not been open for a long time.
A farm requires several components to be viable: arable and uncontaminated soil; well-bred seeds with predictable genetics; untainted and readily-available water; nutritionally-rich fodder for livestock; clean air; farmers uninhibited to assemble these elements into a productive enterprise. In Gaza, long before the commencement of the most recent genocide, the Israeli occupying force through its siege throttled every one of these inputs.
The occupation has subjected the ground, out of which Gazan farmers bring forth life against the odds, to a barrage of degradations through the decades: a market-imposed overreliance on imported synthetic fertilizers, bulldozers and tanks compacting the earth, and impact craters from periodic bombings. This ground—which Israel had already so ruthlessly corrupted—has been further eroded over the last year. Fields lie desiccated ,and satellite imagery shows approximately forty-five percent of all agricultural land in the strip has been damaged. UN experts estimate that it could take up to fourteen years to clear the land in Gaza of unexploded ordnance. The violence will not end when the worst of the genocide concludes.
Most of the reporting on Gaza’s agriculture has been expectedly grim. This matches the reality. Naser Qadous, the Palestine Agricultural Programs Manager for Anera, told me that something close to one billion dollars of losses has hit the farming sector since the beginning of the war—and that only measures up through April. Qadous sent me an image of complete devastation to a greenhouse structure his organization had helped repair just two years ago. The plastic components are melted and warped, the poly sheeting draped over twisted metal frames, its translucence ruined with gray soot.
Michael Fakhri, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, found in his most recent report that “Israel has destroyed approximately ninety-three per cent of the economy of the agriculture, forestry and fishing sector.” That report, released in July, contextualizes Israel’s attacks on Gaza’s food system as a key strategy in its genocide.
Cultivating Hope
The murder of Youssef and so many like him, leaves us little room for optimism. Still, it is necessary to note that farmers have planted seeds during this year of genocide, harvested tomatoes, cucumbers, and onions. These growers find strength in each other, resisting the Israeli state violence through their steadfastness.
Abu Rabie was not alone in his efforts to reestablish farming in his region. Early in 2024, he formed the Beit Lahia Farmers’ Gathering (BLFG), a network of growers in the region working to “ease [the] economic and social hardships by providing financial and material aid to sustain agriculture and ensure local food supply.”
Before Israeli forces razed it, Abu Rabie cultivated a shared parcel of land, together with other farmers and their families who returned to their home city. “Every farmer and his family, he plants,” he told me. There are videos on Abu Rabie’s Facebook page of men working side by side, transplanting eggplant, harvesting mulukhiyya and bundling it up in twine, delivering it to people living in the ruins of the city.
This BLFG initiative consisted of more than just the collective farm. Abu Rabie also built a makeshift nursery where he grew thousands of seedlings, many of which were distributed across Beit Lahia and planted out on patios, rooftops—anywhere someone could tend to them. “We distribute seedlings to people in light of the famine and ongoing war. This somewhat eases them so that they will get some crops within days, so that they can eat,” he explained to me.
Fakhri’s report to the UN begins with the startling fact that, by December, 2023, only a short couple of months after Israel announced its starvation campaign on 9 October, “Palestinians in Gaza made up eighty percent of the people in the world experiencing famine or catastrophic hunger.” The paltry amount of food aid that trickles past restrictive Israeli officials into the strip is made up almost exclusively of shelf stable items. At times over the last year, Israel has entirely choked off even this trickle. Meanwhile, the produce that is available for purchase is exorbitantly expensive. Qadous told me that a pound of onions costs thirty US dollars. With imposed scarcity driving up inflation for fresh food, the ability for Gazans to take even a modest harvest from their home garden can be both nutritionally important and spiritually significant.
Abu Rabie put it to me this way: “We do not wait for aid and humiliation. This was the goal: to cultivate our land and cultivate hope again in Gaza, especially in Beit Lahia.” When Israel stopped all seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides from entering the strip last year—a policy that has not let up—this was a decision to inflict state-sanctioned starvation.
Agroecological Alternatives
The destruction of Palestinians’ right to food continues an enduring policy of dispossession spanning the eight decades since Israel’s founding in 1948. Going back even further, long before the Nakba, Jewish settlers from Europe were engaging in colonial tactics meant to deprive indigenous Palestinians of their rights to farmland and pasture.
This denial of self-determination on ancestral lands structures the shared experiences of Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, in scattered refugee camps throughout neighboring countries, and within Israel. More than eighty percent of Palestinians in Gaza are refugees, forcibly displaced from their homes, living under years of economic blockade and violent attacks from Israel. This long history of Israeli settler-colonial violence culminated in a moment that was primed for genocide. Fakhri finds that “prior to 7 October 2023, approximately half of the people in Gaza were food insecure and more than eighty percent relied on humanitarian aid; the total siege was an immediate catalyst for starvation.” Israel has, since its inception, intentionally created an economy of dependence and deprivation.
For Palestinian growers, this imbalanced economic relationship looks like an overreliance on imported agricultural materials. Saad Dagher, an agronomist based near Ramallah who consulted for Abu Rabie, understands how this relationship leads to both ecological and economic vulnerabilities. Like most agricultural engineers trained in the 1980s (and still to this day), Dagher learned chemical farming during his studies in the Soviet Union. Upon his return to Palestine, he began to experimentally garden without the typical arsenal of sprays and soil conditioners conventional to industrial agriculture.
Dagher’s first official attempt at chemical-free growing was in 1995, at a time when ecological farming methods had not yet proliferated as a common alternative to the agricultural paradigm set by the Green Revolution. So early on was Dagher’s adoption of this approach, that the language used to describe what he was doing in the field was not readily available to him. In 2002, an Argentinian friend came to visit. “He wanted to see what I was doing,” Dagher told me, ”When he entered the farm he was shocked. And he said, ‘You are doing agroecology.’”
Agroecological farming seeks to build food systems with low reliance on external chemical inputs while increasing incorporation of locally-produced organic materials, with the aim of improving the farm’s ecology and economy. A producer who develops on-farm fertility, applies appropriate-scale technology, and reduces pesticide usage through mechanisms of biodiversity is a farmer who is less subject to the profit-seeking whims of the market—or the blockades of a genocidal colonial power. So too is a farmer who grows and saves their own seeds.
Saving Seeds
In 2019, two sisters established the only official seed bank in Gaza. In the village of al-Qarara near Khan Younis, the sisters and their family began to gather baladi seeds (heirloom varieties) from local farmers. Before the war, the bank accommodated refrigerators to store the seeds and a solar-powered machine to dry them. It held thirty-three different types of traditional seeds: wheat, chard, spinach, parsley, squash, and many others.
The sisters continue their work today, now without the infrastructure which housed the project. Israeli forces destroyed the facility, along with so much of Khan Younis, a city targeted in the genocide’s early days.
One of the sisters told me how they began to pick up the pieces. “We started from scratch and worked to find seeds again, we communicated with farmers who we had previously dealt with, we got some seeds [from them] and started working.” The physical structure of the seed bank and the technologies it requires to operate at scale have broken under the totalizing violence of the Israeli state. But the chains of human cooperation that undergird its continued existence are not severed.
The Union of Agricultural Work Committees, an NGO leading the fight for food sovereignty and agroecology in Palestine, considers the preservation of baladi seeds vital for strengthening sumud. Mazin Qumsiyeh, a renowned biologist from the West Bank, explained the meaning of sumud as, “a combination of resistance, resilience, and regeneration.” Rana Issa, a professor of Translation Studies at the American University of Beirut, sees a connection between the concepts of sumud and “survivance,” a critical term from Native American Studies, which points to the “conjunction between resistance and survival”.
As it was before the war, the sisters continue to receive seeds from farmers and pass them on to other growers. Those growers leave some of that crop to bolt, and then harvest and distribute the seeds, and the cycle endures.
Heirloom seeds have been largely replaced in Gaza by hybrids, which large agribusiness monopolies import. These seeds, especially when combined with other modern farm technologies like synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, can increase yields substantially. It is not common practice to save hybrid seeds, as the next generation is almost guaranteed to produce diminished results. This situation keeps growers as perpetual patrons of the multinational corporations who own and sell these elemental farm inputs.
Growing at the Fringes
Farmers in the region have adopted hybrid crops and other tools of industrial agriculture to compete with highly subsidized food imports. The continuously shrinking availability of arable land in Gaza compounds the pressure for maximal farm efficiency.
The vast majority of farms in the Gaza Strip are smallholdings. I spoke with an agricultural expert in Gaza who estimated that more than ninety-five percent of the farmers in the strip cultivate plots that are between a half and three dunams (a dunam is equivalent to 1,000 square meters). In most US cities, less than one percent of the food available to consumers is grown on urban farms.
In essence, nearly the entirety of Gaza has lost its rural character. It has been comprehensively transformed from an area of cities and villages to an impossibly dense megalopolis. Incredibly, at the peak of Abu Rabie’s initiative to reestablish agriculture in Beit Lahia, he and his fellow farmers collectively planted over 300 dunams, working at a scale uncommon in the region.
The land accessible for Gazans to grow food before 7 October was already in short supply. Rooftop gardens in Gaza represent a practice of unavoidable resourcefulness. In the US, rooftop gardens can sometimes take on a bourgeois character. It is expensive to move soil to the top of a NYC skyscraper, and perhaps not entirely socially necessary to host farm-to-fork dinners from on high. In Gaza, the IOF has compressed the literal surface area in the strip, leaving farmers no other choice but to adopt a flagship technique of urban agriculture.
The genocide in Gaza lays bare the vital necessity for applied concepts of alternative farming philosophies, methods that can sometimes feel theoretical for high-income enthusiasts of organic agriculture in the Global North. In the US, the food economy—while severely unjust and insecure for many people—“works” for large segments of the population.
The victims of our food system are generally the most marginalized in our society. Regimes of food apartheid in Black and Brown communities, rising rates of diabetes for low-income Americans, the increasing prevalence of very low food insecurity are all serious symptoms indicating structural failures. But these failures are baked into the machine.
The behemoth agricultural economy heaves on. Millions of mouths are fed, mostly through the exploited labor of migrant farmworkers, whose livelihoods are kept precarious via dehumanizing immigration laws. Our politicians pass over those who are left behind to get sick and hungry, and police keep them out of commercial spaces to prevent shoppers from developing pangs of guilt.
In Gaza, every last person suffers from the Israeli colonizers’ intentional undermining of food sovereignty, now more than ever.
Sana’ Karajeh, of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, put it in these stark terms: “It is in the interest of the Israeli occupation for us to remain dependent on them as the power that provides food for the occupied people.”
For those who labor in Gaza’s food economy, the practices of social and economic solidarity, developed out of necessity for survival up until this point, have become lifeline networks. Working together to plow fields back into productive farmland, keeping alive the seed-sharing links between growers and seed-savers, carrying nursery flats up disintegrating stairwells to enliven abandoned patio gardens: these are feats of resistance.
When I checked in with Abu Rabie late in the night on Sunday, 20 October, it was already morning in Gaza. “Are you safe, Youssef?,” I wrote, “I saw the news of the recent attack on Beit Lahia.” He responded, “Hello. I am fine, thank God.” Later that day, Israel killed him. Between feelings of rage, sadness, disbelief, and inevitability, I was reminded of this cold fact: the righteousness of his struggle could not save him from Israel’s genocide.