When Israeli troops launched their ground invasion of northern Gaza in 2023, one of the first places they rolled into was the Abu Suffiyeh family farm in the Jabalya area (see pdf, page 301). The attackers had targeted the farm, with its thriving olive, pomegranate, and citrus orchards, for total destruction, because it lay in the path of a “raid route” they planned to use for incursions into Gaza in the months that followed.
Using bulldozers, the invaders plowed serpentine paths throughout the entire farm, scouring away all trees, other vegetation, and topsoil. With the soil they removed, the invaders constructed high earthen berms along the raid route and around the encampments they were establishing.
In before-and-after satellite images of the area, the London-based research group Forensic Architecture saw clear signs of bulldozing so comprehensive that “the farm’s shape and boundaries are no longer discernible. Orchards are uprooted. Infrastructure necessary for cultivation, such as the water tank, are destroyed.” An Abu Suffiyeh family member told researchers, “There is no land at all now . . . I mean, it is now the same as it was before: desert. It’s again a desert. There is no single tree there. No traces of prior life . . . There is almost nothing to recognize there. No traces of the land we knew. They totally erased it. It used to be a lively area, but now there is no life at all there.” (pdf page 308)
A War on the Land Itself
We’ve seen countless horrific images in the past 16 months showing wholesale destruction of Gaza’s urban areas, but the deliberate devastation wasn’t limited to cities. Israel’s US-provisioned assault extended throughout the countryside. One result: a staggering 83 percent of Gaza’s plant life, encompassing both natural green spaces and crops, was destroyed (pdf, page 40).
Gaza’s food-producing capacity, too, has been all but wiped out. Of its 54 square miles of agricultural land, 37 have been seriously damaged. And 45 percent of greenhouses have been rendered nonfunctional. An Al Jazeera investigationpublished last July found “significant damage” to 626 water wells, 307 home barns, 235 chicken farms, and 203 sheep farms. In late 2024, FAO assessed that in Gaza, only 43 percent of sheep, 37 percent of goats, 5 percent of cattle, and 1 percent of poultry had survived the onslaught.
Fish almost completely vanished from diets in Gaza. In the early months of the war, Israeli bombing rendered the territory’s small fishing port nonfunctional. More than 200 fishers have been shot and killed by the Israeli navy, and thousands have lost their livelihoods. Even now, with a ceasefire in place since January 19, Israeli gunboats continue to fire upon and kill any fishers who dare to venture even a short distance into the Mediterranean Sea.
The most expansive destruction has been accomplished through attacks on field crops and orchards. Gaza’s most fertile farmland, a long strip a few miles wide running the length of the territory’s eastern edge, has long been crucial to producing most of the vegetables consumed within the territory. Accordingly, Israel has heavily targeted that eastern area during the current genocide. Invading troops have used US-made Caterpillar D9 bulldozers to destroy crops, trees, irrigation systems, and, most critically, precious topsoil. By repeatedly driving heavy military equipment—including tanks and bulldozers—across the landscape, they have severely compacted the soil and further degraded its productive capacity. As on the Abu Suffiyeh farm, they’ve also employed bulldozers to build berms, mounds, or other fortifications, thereby rendering entire fields useless for cropping.
Gaza’s soils have suffered in other ways. Constant aerial bombardment has formed countless craters and caused other physical damage to the soil structure. Bombing and demolition in rural areas has permeated the soil with residues from explosives, unexploded ordnance, toxic chemicals, heavy metals, and other pollutants. Leakage of fuel and other fluids from military vehicles and other machinery, the burial of debris and even human or livestock remains, and the intentional spraying of Palestinians’ crops with herbicides has further contaminated the soil. (pdf page 65)
As they ravaged the landscape, Israeli troops at times displayed a high degree of sadistic creativity. This January, for example, Al Jazeerareported that new satellite images of the Beit Hanoun area in northern Gaza showed that Israeli tanks had carved a 200-foot-wide Star of David into the middle of a field. The star was accompanied by the numerals “7979”, 150 feet tall. Read right to left, as in Hebrew, this was a possible reference to the Israeli occupation forces’ notorious 97th Netzah Yehuda Battalion, an ultra-Orthodox unit that has been accused of killing unarmed Palestinians and torturing and sexually abusing prisoners.
A defense analyst told Al Jazeera that the attackers engraved the star into Gaza’s soil “for Google Maps,” as a boast to the world “that they were here.”
A History of Enforcing Hunger
Sadly, the sick Beit Hanoun prank was not a new concept; such vandalism has been going on for at least 15 years. During Israel’s brutal air and ground assault on Gaza in 2009 (dubbed “Operation Cast Lead” by the Zionists), a set of tank tracks forming a similarly sized Star of David appeared in satellite images of farmland near Rafah, at the opposite end of Gaza from Beit Hanoun.
Indeed, violence of all kinds against Gaza’s farmland has been a fact of life throughout the two decades since Israeli troops and settlers retreated from the strip in 2005. Soon after leaving, Israel embarked on a different version of occupation: a siege that completely enclosed the strip with prison-style fencing, a naval blockade, deadly firepower, and severely restricted access to food and other supplies. Under this siege, Gaza’s farmland, orchards, greenhouses, and urban gardens became more crucial than ever for keeping its population fed. So, naturally, Israeli forces routinelyattacked that homegrown food supply.
They labeled a 20-mile-long strip of fertile vegetable-growing land just inside the eastern prison fence as a “buffer zone” from which Palestinians were wholly excluded. The precise size of this no-go zone wasn’t specified; in practice, though, its width tended to vary between 300 and 1,000 yards as measured from the fence (pdf, p. 57). Over the years, occupation troops enforced the ban on farming within the zone by bulldozing crops, firing at farmers, or aerially spraying herbicides. Since October, 2023, such attacks have expanded and intensified, to the point that food production has become almost impossible in that agricultural heartland of Gaza.
Displacement of People Plus Destruction of Agriculture—That Was the Plan
In 2023, during the early months of the war, the Israeli strategy focused on driving the civilian population out of urban and rural areas of northern Gaza, to the southeast toward the region around Khan Yunis and, subsequently, southwest from there toward Rafah on the border with Egypt. Then, in spring 2024, they forcibly displaced the Palestinians again, westward toward the arid sand-dune landscape of the al-Mawasi region along the coast. Forensic Architecture’s analysts concluded that the genocidal military strategists planned for these successive expulsions to drive the civilian population away from productive farmlands of the north and east toward drier, sandier, much less productive lands in the southwest of Gaza. That undercut the Palestinians’ ability to produce their own food even as Israel was choking off the flow of external food aid into the strip. The analysts’ maps (pdf pages 804-816) clearly showed that starvation was a goal, not just a side effect, of the population displacements. They wrote,
“When we layered the evacuation orders received by Palestinian civilians with the destruction of agriculture, we observed another correlation: the agricultural parts in the east parts of Gaza received evacuation orders and the fields there were subsequently and thoroughly destroyed . . . Displacement and the destruction of agriculture were an organized result . . . The destruction of agriculture – fields, orchards, greenhouses – restricted the possibility for Palestinians in Gaza to grow and obtain food independently, and the targeting of aid restricted and controlled food coming from the outside.” [pdf page 787]
For Palestinians, suspended in the midst of a fragile ceasefire (and now with a cartoon-villain US president plotting to seize their entire territory and expel them), the future is utterly unpredictable. Even if Israel does not reignite the genocide—and that’s a huge ‘if’—the rebuilding of homes, hospitals, schools, greenhouses, water systems, and other structures will be a long, arduous process. But restoring Gaza’s food-production capacity will take even longer, because the soils won’t be restored to their full state of health for decades. Israeli troops used heavy industrial means to destroy the productivity of Gaza’s soils, but there are no industrial processes capable of quickly restoring them to full fertility and health. The natural processes for doing that will play out deep into this century.
But the land isn’t gone. It’s still there, and the soil fertility can be partially restored—at least to a state in which it can be farmed. And rest assured that it will be Palestinians who do the farming. They continue to proclaim as forcefully as ever that no one will ever uproot them from their land.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/02/09/ravaging-the-soils-of-gaza/
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