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‘Bulldozed and shelled’

Gaza farming sector ravaged by Israeli offensive now in its 10th month
PHOTO: AFP
Displaced Palestinians carry belongings as they walk in front of a destroyed building in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip yesterday. An Israeli air strike on a house in the town of Zawayda, in central Gaza, killed at least six people and wounded several others.
AFP, Palestinian Territories
Tank tracks still fresh on his field in southern Gaza’s coastal area of Al-Mawasi, Nedal Abu Jazar lamented the damage offensive has wrought on his trees and crops.
“Look at the destruction,” the 39-year-old farmer told AFP, holding an uprooted tomato plant. He pointed to his greenhouse’s metal frame and its white plastic sheeting strewn across the plot, inside an area designated a humanitarian zone by the Israeli army.
“People were sitting peacefully on their farmland ... and suddenly tanks arrived and fired at us, and then there were (air) strikes.”
Abu Jazar said the Israeli operation in late June destroyed about 40 dunams (10 acres) of land and killed five labourers.
His is not an isolated case. Across Gaza, 57 percent of agricultural land has been damaged since the offensive began, according to a joint assessment published in June by the UN’s agriculture and satellite imagery agencies, FAO and UNOSAT.
The damage threatens Gaza’s food sovereignty, Matieu Henry of the Food and Agriculture Organization told AFP, because 30 percent of the Palestinian territory’s food consumption comes from agricultural land.
“If almost 60 percent of the agricultural land has been damaged, this may have a significant impact in terms of food security and food supply.”
The Gaza Strip exported $44.6 million worth of produce in 2022, mainly to the West Bank and Israel, with strawberries and tomatoes representing 60 percent of the total, according to FAO data.
The damage assessment on the agricultural land comes as the UN’s hunger monitoring system estimated in June that 96 percent of Gaza faces high levels of acute food insecurity.
Contacted by AFP, the Israeli army said it “does not intentionally harm agricultural land”.
In a statement, it said Hamas “often operates from within orchards, fields and agricultural land”.
The impact is worse in the Palestinian territory’s north, where 68 percent of agricultural land is damaged, although the southern area encompassing parts of Al-Mawasi has seen the most significant increase in recent months due to operations.
UNOSAT’s Lars Bromley told AFP the damage is generally “due to the impact of activities such as heavy vehicle activity, bombing, shelling, and other conflict-related dynamics, which would be things like areas burning”.
Near the southern city of Rafah, 34-year-old farmer Ibrahim Dheir feels helpless after the destruction of 20 dunams (five acres) of land he used to lease, and all his farming equipment with it.
“As soon as the Israeli bulldozers and tanks entered the area, they began bulldozing cultivated lands with various trees, including fruits, citrus, guava, as well as crops like spinach, molokhia (jute mallow), eggplant, squash, pumpkin and sunflower seedlings,” he said, before listing more damage in a testimony of the area’s past agricultural abundance.
Dheir, whose family exported its produce to the West Bank and Israel, now feels destitute. “We used to depend on agriculture for our livelihood day by day, but now there’s no work or income.”
Farmer Abu Mahmoud Za’arab also finds himself with “no source of income”. The 60-year-old owns 15 dunams (3.7 acres) of land on which crops and fruit trees used to grow.