Farmers in the Gaza Strip once tended eggplants, peppers and tomatoes in modest plots squeezed between the territory’s urban sprawl and the watchtowers of the Israeli border wall.
But after more than a year of war, the farms are in ruins, their fields damaged by tanks and troop movements, their equipment destroyed and many farmers killed.
In Beit Lahia, once a relatively verdant area in northern Gaza in which neighbors worked together to grow food, Yousef Saqer, 24, surveyed the land where his greenhouses and irrigation systems once stood.
“That is all gone now,” he said recently, shortly before Israel began another deadly offensive in the area targeting what it has described as a regrouped Hamas presence. “The tanks destroyed all of it.”
“We used to use machines and tractors and now we are back to digging with hoes, forks and shovels,” he said. “We went back to the old ways of doing everything.”
Gaza never had enough farmland to feed all of its 2.2 million people, who live in a densely populated and highly urbanized place. Most of Gaza’s food supply before the war was brought into the territory by relief agencies, a consequence of an Israeli and Egyptian blockade on the territory intended to weaken Hamas.
But agriculture and fishing were nonetheless an important part of the economy, producing jobs, a trickle of export revenue and food for the population.
Now, as Israel has imposed extensive restrictions on aid into Gaza, the enclave is on the edge of famine. A U.N.-backed panel of experts, the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, has warned of the risk in Gaza for nearly a year. Last month, it said almost every person in the territory still faced high levels of acute food insecurity, calling on Israel to ensure “unimpeded access” for aid, but also to restore food production.
“I don’t know of any place on this planet that has gone through something like this at this scale,” said Arif Husain, the chief economist at the U.N. World Food Program, noting that nearly the entire population of the enclave is at risk of starvation.
Israel has tightly regulated the entrance of all goods and restricts the import of what it calls “dual use” items: civilian products and supplies that it says could also be used for military purposes.
In response to a list of questions for this article, the Israeli military said it “does not aim to inflict damage to civilian infrastructure” and “most certainly does not use water, agricultural lands, or any humanitarian resources as a weapon of war.” It accused Hamas of embedding in civilian areas, including “in and near agricultural areas in question.”
Since the war began, the World Food Program, on average, had been able to bring only 20 percent of the food aid needed by Gaza into the enclave, Mr. Husain said. At the same time, farms have been debilitated. In May, an analysis of satellite and other data by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization found that the war had damaged 57 percent of Gaza’s farmland, destroyed 33 percent of its greenhouses and killed 70 percent of its livestock.
The losses have hit Gaza’s farmers hard. Growing peppers and other crops used to provide Raed Abu Asad, 47, with what he described as “a luxurious life,” even amid the deprivations of the blockade. He employed 15 men and made enough money to provide his family with foreign educations for his son and daughter, a nice house and garden, a car, and a solar power system.
But war has destroyed that life, even in Deir al Balah, his hometown, a central Gazan city that has been spared some of the worst of Israel’s bombardment.
A large part of his land has become unusable, and the rest has become extremely expensive to farm, he estimated. He used to pay around $1,700 per acre for tarps for his greenhouses, but the price has jumped to more than $12,000 because so many people now live in tents made of plastic sheeting. And he had to buy two new generators to run his irrigation systems, at an expense of almost $8,000.
He has lost about $100,000 since the war began, he said. The thought of rebuilding everything he has lost is too much to bear, especially with no end to the conflict in sight, he said.
“I have to keep farming now to at least survive and feed my family,” he said. “But I am giving up and planning to flee Gaza for good when this war is over. I am taking my family and leaving here for sure.”
Israeli security restrictions in Gaza’s coastal waters have also made fishing impossible since the war began, according to aid workers and fishermen in the enclave. Nezar Ayyash, the president of the Gaza fishermen’s association, said at least 120 fishermen have been killed during the war.
“Desperate and hungry fishermen now go to the sea only to fish very close to the shore,” said Mr. Ayyash. “They are risking their lives, but they have no other option. The army have been shooting everyone going to the sea.”
The Israeli military did not dispute that its forces have opened fire on people in fishing boats off the coast of Gaza, saying that “this maritime zone is considered a combat area.”
“The Israeli naval forces’ objective is to protect the state of Israel from security threats in the maritime area in general, and specifically in the maritime space of the Gaza Strip,” the military said in a statement. “The population in the Gaza Strip has been informed of these restrictions.”
In Beit Lahia, Mr. Saqer lamented the days when he and his neighbors used to plant strawberries. “Beit Lahia was known as part of Gaza’s bread basket,” he said. “Everyone here is a farmer.”
He described the Israeli military as pushing “us back in history around 100 years” by destroying solar panels — which Israel considers to be “dual use” — that powered farms, restricting the entry of fuel for generators and machinery, and reducing the amount of land available for use with military activity.
Mr. Saqer’s family fled their house early in the war, but they later returned home like many of their neighbors. When they got there, they planted new crops in the ruins. Leaving their land felt like abandoning a way of life, Mr. Saqer said, not to mention a source of food as famine loomed.
But as they planted vegetables like mallow and zucchini, they avoided about one third of their land. “We avoided the farmland very close to the border,” he said. “Tanks and snipers are there.”
In recent weeks, northern Gaza has again become the focus of an Israeli military offensive, a sign of its struggle to defeat Hamas as the armed group fights on as a guerrilla force.
This week, the main emergency service in Gaza said it has had to cease all rescue operations there, and Gaza’s Civil Defense, which doesn’t differentiate between fighters and civilians, said renewed Israeli airstrikes had killed more than 1,000 people in the area.
Mr. Saqer was one of them.
Three weeks after he was interviewed for this article, he was killed by an Israeli airstrike on Oct. 21, his family said.
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