Gaza Farmers Attempt to Rebuild With 96% of Farmland Destroyed

Gaza’s Farmers Face the Ruins of a Decimated Agricultural Sector

When a ceasefire or pause in fighting allows people to move, the instinct to return to the land is among the most fundamental human impulses — an assertion of life, continuity, and dignity. For Gaza’s farmers, that return is now being made to fields that are barely recognisable: buried under rubble, laced with unexploded ordnance, stripped of irrigation infrastructure, and cut off from the seeds, equipment, and fuel needed to begin again. With the United Nations and humanitarian monitors documenting the near-total destruction of Gaza’s agricultural sector across more than eighteen months of war, the question of how — and whether — Palestinian farmers can rebuild is inseparable from the question of whether Gaza itself can survive as a place where human life is sustained.

The Scale of Agricultural Destruction

The source figure alone is staggering: 96 percent of Gaza’s farmland has been destroyed. Gaza’s agricultural sector — encompassing citrus groves, olive orchards, vegetable plots, livestock facilities, greenhouses, and fishing infrastructure along the Mediterranean coast — had already been constrained for nearly two decades by Israel’s blockade of the territory, which restricted the import of agricultural inputs and the export of produce. What that blockade had diminished over years, the military campaign accelerated into near-annihilation.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has documented widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure throughout Gaza, including agricultural land, in its regular situation reports on the occupied Palestinian territory. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has similarly flagged the collapse of food production systems in Gaza as a driver of acute food insecurity, which independent monitors and UN bodies have described as reaching famine-level conditions in parts of the territory.

For farmers attempting to return to their land, the physical dangers compound the economic ones. Unexploded ordnance — shells, bombs, and other munitions that did not detonate on impact — now lies beneath or embedded within the soil across large portions of Gaza. Attempting to till, plant, or irrigate carries a direct risk to life, and clearing such ordnance requires specialised teams and equipment that are in desperately short supply inside the territory.

The Blockade as a Structural Barrier to Recovery

Even where farmers can safely access land, Israel’s continued blockade of Gaza is reported to be making agricultural recovery nearly impossible. Recovery requires seeds suited to the growing season, fertiliser, pesticides, replacement irrigation pipes and pumps, fuel to power equipment, and the means to transport produce. Under the blockade framework that has governed Gaza since 2007 — tightened significantly during and after the current military campaign — the entry of goods into the territory has been subject to Israeli control, and agricultural inputs have historically been among the categories subject to restriction on the grounds of potential dual use.

Human rights organisations including Al-Haq, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have argued in published reports that the blockade itself constitutes collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population, a practice prohibited under international humanitarian law. The prolonged restriction of agricultural inputs has, over years, structurally undermined Gaza’s capacity for food self-sufficiency — and the current level of destruction makes external supply not a supplement to local production but the difference between starvation and survival.

Who Bears the Weight

Gaza’s farmers are not an abstraction. Agriculture was, before the war, one of the few productive economic sectors available to a population living under blockade with severely limited freedom of movement. Farming families — many of whom are themselves descendants of Palestinians displaced from villages inside what is now Israel in 1948, the Nakba — had over generations rebuilt livelihoods tied to the land they could access. The destruction of that land, and the barriers to its recovery, represent not only an economic blow but a rupture in the social fabric and intergenerational identity that farming sustains.

What to Watch

The trajectory of Gaza’s agricultural recovery will depend heavily on whether access to agricultural inputs is permitted at meaningful scale, whether demining operations can be resourced adequately, and whether any ceasefire or political arrangement produces conditions that allow sustained cultivation rather than repeated displacement. Monitoring by OCHA, FAO, and organisations such as Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor will remain critical to documenting both progress and continued obstruction.

For now, Gaza’s farmers are beginning — in the most literal sense — to dig. What they find beneath the surface, and what they are permitted to bring in from outside, will determine whether that labour can sustain life or remains an act of hope against overwhelming odds.