How my family has survived the famine in Gaza

November19, 2024

Soha Ahmed Hamdouna

For months, residents of northern Gaza have been living in extremely harsh and inhumane conditions. The situation has worsened recently. Initially, our goal was to find food, but now even finding clean drinking water is considered a stroke of luck.

Palestinians wait to receive food distributed by an aid organization in Deir Al Balah, Gaza on November 18, 2024. (Photo: Omar Ashtawy/APA Images)

One woman recently told me while we were waiting in line for aid, “Days have passed, and I could only get bread and water for my children. Waiting is killing me; I hope every moment that this war will end. Getting a chicken is a dream for my children and me right now.”

All the poultry and livestock farms have been targeted. My friend Iman Najm witnessed a massacre when she was staying with her family in a poultry and cattle farm owned by her relatives. In the middle of the night, it was struck by a missile. Iman woke up to screams and blood everywhere. Not a single chicken or cow was left; even her uncle was martyred in the massacre. It has been some time since it happened, but we cannot forget Israel’s crimes that affect humans, plants, and animals alike. The land became saturated with blood and rocket ash, and the farms now stand as silent witnesses to this catastrophe.

What hurts me more than my hunger is seeing my children asking for food and clean water. We live in times where even finding vegetables is a dream. I won’t even mention fruit, as it has become a distant luxury we cannot afford to think about. Yet the Palestinian spirit to persevere is strong. Let me share with you what I went through just to get a few tomatoes.

We don’t have land or space for farming, but we used my grandmother’s beautiful home, which was destroyed by Israeli bulldozers. She was eighty years old, had suffered from a stroke, and was paralyzed on her right side for seven years but still she refused to leave her home and land. But on the morning of October 29, 2023 during the raid near al-Shifa Hospital, her home was bombed and bulldozed. She and my uncle died amid the sounds of terror, bombing, and destruction. Her land was now empty—our memories of her beautiful house had been stolen.

We overcame this and tried to adapt amidst the ruins. Three months ago, my husband planted tomatoes where her house once stood.

My husband planted tomatoes, and only three grew. They are the best we have—or rather, they are all we have, along with flour. We consider ourselves fortunate because there are people without even a tomato, surviving only on canned food that have caused intestinal infections, and weakened our frail bodies.

There have been no serious attempts to resolve this famine. Empty stomachs have no voice amid the extermination happening in the north, with bodies in the streets and dead animals lying on the roads. This is our reality in northern Gaza: we pass the days among ruined walls and land unfit for farming due to ashes and chemical residues from missiles, instead of nurturing vegetables and fruits.

Hunger in the north has become a common language among everyone, sparing neither young nor old. A seventy-year-old neighbor told me, “I don’t even have flour because I don’t have the strength to stand in line for hours to get a little of it. I live with my grandchildren, whose father was martyred, on scraps of bread left by others. I soak it in water to make it easier to chew.” His words deeply affected me, and I cried before him. I offered him words of patience, saying that every war has an end and that freedom is near. I remembered him when I received some lentils as aid the next day; I gave him a hot dish, and his heartfelt prayers gave me strength and patience.

One woman told me while waiting in line for medicine for my daughter, who suffers severe stomach pain from contaminated water, “We have wasted our time and days just waiting in lines to get basic necessities like food, water, and medicine.” She told me that I am lucky because I only have two children, while she has five and puts in much more effort to get enough water and canned food.

We are now living through the harshest chapter of our lives, as winter has arrived with empty stomachs, cold bodies, and partially destroyed homes or tents that give us neither security nor warmth; inside, it is colder than outside. The hardest part is seeing our children suffer from illness, cold, and hunger, while all we have is patience and prayers. Our once beautiful bodies have turned thin, with pale faces.

At night, the doors close, silence fills the place, and all we hear is the sound of warplanes in the sky. We sit close to one another, offering each other comfort and looking up to the sky with prayers to wake up to the good news that the war has ended.

I just want to wake up feeling safe to save what remains of my homeland. I don’t want my children to die of hunger, nor do I want their dreams to be reduced to a roasted chicken or a delicious meal we used to prepare with love before the war. We just want food and a day like the days before October 7. We are in a daily battle for survival and on a very long journey of patience and suffering.

 

For Gaza’s olive farmers, the war has left little to salvage

Taghreed Ali and Ibtisam Mahdi

 

 Palestinians collect olives from a tree during the annual harvest season, in Deir al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip, September 21, 2024. (Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

Over the past several weeks, Palestinian olive farmers in Gaza have been desperately trying to salvage what remains of their crops. For many of them, that’s not much at all: over three-quarters of olive trees in the Strip have been destroyed by Israel’s attacks over the last year. Many trees that were not directly bombed or bulldozed shed their fruits as a result of the force of nearby explosions, which have also limited the ability of farmers to safely access their groves. Some farmers have even had to take the devastating decision to cut down their trees for fuel.

The olive harvest has long been a vital cultural practice that reinforces Palestinians’ connection to their land, bringing together all generations of the family each year as the fruits become ripe. It is also important economically, constituting the majority of agricultural income for farmers who sell the olives cured or pressed as olive oil or soap.

The physical labor of harvesting is often punctuated by singing traditional songs and dancing dabkeh. Harvesters prepare a communal breakfast, usually some combination of saj bread dipped in oil, zaatar, and duqqa. Later, they take a break from work to gather kindling for an open fire, where dishes like fatteh or maqluba are cooked for lunch.

Yet in Gaza, for the second year in a row, what was once an annual celebration of culture and community has become a lonely and dangerous endeavor, accompanied by the sounds of artillery shells, warplanes, and ambulance sirens.

According to Mohammed Abu Ouda, director of the tree horticulture department at Gaza’s Agriculture Ministry, only one-fifth of the Strip’s olive trees are still standing after more than a year of Israel’s onslaught. And of the 40 olive presses that operated across Gaza before the outbreak of the war, only six remain: one in the north, four in the central region, and one in the south.

Fayyad Fayyad, director of the Palestinian Olive Oil Council, told +972 that predicting how much olive oil will be produced this season in Gaza is “impossible,” but the amount is likely to fall below 10 percent of the annual average. “The productivity per dunam of land planted with olives in the Gaza Strip was among the highest in the world before the war,” he lamented.

‘Last year, I lost the entire crop’

Khalil Nabhan, a 52-year-old farmer from the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in eastern Gaza City, moves swiftly among the branches of his olive trees, gathering their fruit. Despite Israel’s repeated attacks on his land, Nabhan has tried to salvage what remains of his crop. “Unlike every other year, I started picking the olives before the rains came in an attempt to save what’s left,” he said.

Before the war, Nabhan would pick olives together with his whole family every morning during harvest season. This year, fearing for his family’s safety, he has had to harvest by himself.

Nabhan owns 3 dunams (about 0.75 acres) of olive-planted land. Since the start of the war, he has only been able to access one of his plots, while the rest — 2 dunams containing more than 500 olive trees — were entirely destroyed by Israeli bulldozers.

“This land used to yield 600 kilograms of olives before the war,” he said. “Today, the yield won’t exceed 200, which is barely enough to feed my family, with no surplus to sell.”

In addition to Israeli airstrikes causing many olives to fall before they had a chance to ripen Nabhan explained that the blockade and lack of access to water have made it impossible to properly tend to his groves. As a result, many of the trees spared by Israel’s bombardment simply dried up.

“In the past, the olive season was much better, with the availability of fertilizers and water,” he explained. “This year, there’s nothing, which has affected the fruit, making it small and dry.”

Shawqi Mhana, a 61-year-old farmer from the Al-Tuffah neighborhood east of Gaza City, also rushed to harvest his olives early. “Last year, I lost the entire crop because of the war,” he told +972. “I couldn’t harvest the fruits because of the intense Israeli shelling.”

This year hasn’t been any better. Most of Mhana’s olives fell prematurely as a result of Israeli bombardment of his land and nearby agricultural areas. Like Nabhan, he points to the lack of water and fertilizer as further reasons for his inability to sustain his trees.

The proximity of Mhana’s land to the Israeli fence that encircles Gaza to the east makes it especially difficult to access his groves, while also exposing them to airstrikes. Despite the severe damage to his trees and the ever-present threats to his safety, however, Mhana endeavored to gather as many olives as he could. “It’s better than leaving them,” he said.

Mhana’s harvest from his 113 olive trees this year was insufficient for pressing, as it would only produce a few liters of oil. Neither is his harvest suitable for curing and subsequent sale. Since the olives are unusually small, they can only be used for personal consumption.

Although the war has all but ruined this year’s harvest and left Mhana uncertain about the future of his land and livelihood, he remains defiant. “We harvest because it symbolizes holding on to the land and refusing to be displaced from it.”

Skyrocketing costs

In southern Gaza, 36-year-old Majid Abu Daqqa and his wife have been trying to sort the pressable olives from the rest of the crop. Since the beginning of the war, he and his family have been displaced from the Abasan area east of Khan Younis to Al-Mawasi in the west, where he owns 2 dunams of land containing dozens of olive trees.

When the Israeli military invaded the town of Hamad, close to Abu Daqqa’s groves, on Aug. 11, tank shelling destroyed several of his trees. “We tried to collect the olives that were scattered on the ground and sort them after the army withdrew on Aug. 24, but we lost more than half of the crop that we hoped would improve our financial situation,” he lamented.

Since then, his problems have only multiplied. “After sorting and cleaning the olives, we were shocked by the cost of transporting them to the mill on Salah Al-Din street in the center of Gaza, as well as the high price of grinding and pressing them,” he said.

The gallon containers needed to transport the oil, which used to cost NIS 10, now cost NIS 70. The price of production per kilo, meanwhile, has risen from 3 agorot (around 0.01 cents) to NIS 1.5 (40 cents).

Even as farmers struggle to salvage their olives in impossible conditions, these skyrocketing transportation and production costs have rendered olive oil completely unaffordable for most Gazans. Muhammad Al-Astal, head of the Khan Younis Agricultural Cooperative, noted that the price of a 20-liter tin rose from NIS 450 ($120) to NIS 1,200 ($320) over the past year.

Al-Astal, who is a farmer himself, explained that the cooperative’s agricultural lands are within an area designated by the Israeli army as a “humanitarian zone,” yet they have still sustained significant damage from Israel’s attacks. These lands depend on submersible pumps for irrigating crops, which require substantial energy to operate. However, with no electricity, and fuel prices being too high to consider generators, farmers have resorted to using solar energy, which is insufficient to run the pumps efficiently.

Since it is not a relief organization, the cooperative has been unable to assist Gazan farmers. “We have not found any local or international institution attempting to offer support to farmers in the western area of Khan Younis, despite the fact that much of this land is cultivated,” Al-Astal explained. He emphasized that financial support would help farmers lower prices for vegetables and fruits, including olives and olive oil.

‘We finished picking all the olives within one week’

For farmer Ahmed Shatwi, 46, the past year has been the worst he’s ever experienced for olive harvesting. He owns 6 dunams of land located near the Netzarim Corridor — a 7-kilometer zone in the middle of Gaza that Israel’s military has taken over and leveled to the ground — which contained more than 1,600 fruit-bearing olive trees. But over the course of the war, Israel has uprooted two-thirds of these through airstrikes, artillery fire, and bulldozing, while the trees that remain have shed prematurely.

Israel’s attacks have killed, wounded, or displaced many of Shatwi’s family members. For the second consecutive year, he remarked somberly, “the olive harvest did not unite our family.”

For Shatwi and other Palestinian farmers, the harvest is more than just a livelihood: it has come to symbolize his people’s resilience and steadfastness in the face of occupation and war. “All the people of Gaza love the olive tree, and despite the war escalating daily, we remain determined to harvest the fruits,” he said.

A little further south, Hazem Mousa Shaheen, 30, stands among his olive trees that extend over a large tract in the Al-Baraka area in the city of Deir al-Balah. “Within one week we finished picking all the olives,” he told +972. “I tried to collect what I could, as there is an extreme shortage of olive oil and most people cannot afford to forgo picking the few olives they have for nutritional reasons. But we could only pick during very specific hours for fear of being targeted or issued evacuation orders.”

Shaheen and his family rely on the olive harvest for many of their needs, including the income from selling any surplus. This year, however, there will barely be enough for their personal consumption. Apart from the sheer physical destruction of groves as a result of Israeli attacks, he noted, the bombs and artillery shells release chemical substances that are toxic to the olive trees.

While the harvest season used to feel like a holiday, today it carries a heavy weight. “We constantly look at the sky and listen for the sound of nearby shelling,” Shaheen explained. “All we talk about is those who used to be with us and were martyred or wounded during the past year.”

Yet for some farmers in Gaza, even accessing their land has become impossible. Hajj Jamil Al-Kafarna, 64, had to leave behind hundreds of olive trees in Beit Hanoun, in the far north of the Gaza Strip, where the Israeli military has been systematically emptying the land of its Palestinian residents and demolishing or burning the structures left behind. “I heard that my trees were uprooted and the well I dug to irrigate the land was sealed shut,” he told +972.

Over half of his 25 dunams of land was planted with olive trees, but thinking about this causes his heart to sink. “The most difficult days are when I recall the small details of the harvest season,” Al-Kafarna said. “Today, I am living in a classroom in one of UNRWA’s schools west of Deir Al-Balah, and I cannot do anything for my land or the harvest.”

 

More Israelis Are Refusing Deployment to Gaza. Will It Help End the Genocide?

Arvind Dilawar

 

A photograph, taken during an embed with the Israeli military and reviewed by the Israeli military censorship office prior to publication, shows soldiers guarding a tunnel in the Tal as-Sultan area, on September 13, 2024, in Rafah. Ilia Yefimovich / picture alliance via Getty Images

On November 27, Soul Behar Tsalik, an 18-year-old from Tel Aviv, is expected to show up at an induction center for the Israeli military, but he isn’t going to enlist. Instead — like a dozen other Israeli teens in the last year — he has decided to face military prison rather than comply with conscription.

Behar Tsalik describes military service as an obligation that Israelis like him are raised expecting to fulfill from birth, but it becomes increasingly palpable at age 16, when they start receiving their first draft notices. He likens the process to college admissions for teenagers elsewhere, full of angling for the best positions — albeit in military units and divisions, rather than with universities and scholarships. Unit 8200 of the Israeli Intelligence Corps, for example, is well known for being a stepping stone to Israel’s tech industry.

“From around 16, you’re doing well in school and you’re going into programs because you’re trying to get into the best position you can get to in the army,” Behar Tsalik told Truthout. “Some people put in a lot of work, some people don’t. And when you’re 18, you get the official draft letter: ‘Come on this-and-this date for this-and-this job.’ … And that’s when I will probably be going to jail.”

In publicly refusing military service, Behar Tsalik joins hundreds of reservists who have similarly said they would not be complicit in the ongoing Israeli genocide in the Gaza Strip. Together, they hope that they will be able to reprise the role that “refusers,” as they are known in Israel, have played in the past and help bring the current carnage to an end.

“The Circle of Violence”

The refuser movement in Israel is a patchwork of individuals, networks and more formal groups, some organized around specific military units and conflicts, others centering their broader political perspective, typically on the left. Although military service is often described as a national duty in Israel, conscription is in fact far from universal. As little as 50 percent of Israeli citizens actually enlist, according to left-leaning Mesarvot (Hebrew for “I Refuse”), a network of Israeli refusers to which Behar Tsalik belongs. Palestinian citizens of Israel, who make up more than 20 percent of the population, are exempt from military service. Similarly, especially observant religious Jews, who are often described as “ultra-Orthodox” (although some reject the term), make up more than 10 percent of the population and have historically avoided conscription by requesting deferrals for religious study until they reach the age of exemption, which may extend as far as the late thirties.

Other Israeli Jews avoid conscription through medical exemptions or fail to serve their full two-to-three year deployments due to physical or psychological conditions. Others simply opt for months-long prison sentences rather than years-long deployments in order to get back to their private lives sooner. Among reservists who have completed their initial deployment but remain eligible for redeployment until the age of 40, the numbers who serve are as little as 2 percent of the population.

Despite such widespread avoidance of conscription, public opposition is relatively rare. In addition to the months-long prison sentences that can be renewed to years by Israeli military authorities, there is the fear of social ostracization by Israeli society, which is generally very militaristic. That said, many draft resisters — especially those from more left-leaning backgrounds — describe being supported by their immediate family, friends, and other community members, including employers. Nevertheless, fear persists.

“There are many other people who refuse for political reasons,” Nimrod Flaschenberg, a spokesperson for Mesarvot, told Truthout. “But they don’t want to put their faces on it.”

Since Palestinian militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, only a dozen inductees like Behar Tsalik have publicly refused to enlist, along with a few hundred reservists. In fact, in the immediate aftermath of the attack, the Israeli military had 30 percent more reservists volunteer for redeployment than it had actually called up, according to Yesh Gvul (Hebrew for “There is a Limit”), a more centrist organization which supports Israeli refusers.

But as the ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza commenced, reservists like Yuval Green, a medic and member of Yesh Gvul, questioned whether they were rescuing the 240 Israeli hostages captured by Palestinian militants — or exacting revenge for the 1,200 Israelis killed on October 7. (According to the United Nations, more than a dozen Israelis that day were killed by the Israeli military, as reported in The Telegraph and elsewhere.) Due to the escalating violence by Israeli forces in the West Bank, Green was planning on refusing redeployment prior to the attack, but October 7 pushed him to reconsider. His unit was deployed to Gaza, where he witnessed the widespread destruction caused by fellow Israeli soldiers.

Green reached his limit when his commanding officer ordered him to burn down the Palestinian home where his unit had been quartered. When he questioned the necessity of it, he was told it was to conceal their operations and prevent their equipment from falling into militants’ hands. When he offered to sweep the home for any signs of their operational set-up and their equipment, he was once again ordered to burn it down. He refused and shortly thereafter left Gaza.

“All of them knew people who were murdered on the 7th of October,” Green tells Truthout, referring to the other members of his unit. “They were just feeding the circle of violence.”

As of this writing, Israeli forces have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, including 16,000 children, in the Gaza Strip, per the Palestinian Ministry of Health as cited by Al Jazeera. The true toll of the genocide, obscured by the ongoing Israeli attacks and blockade, may top 330,000 deaths by the end of the year, according to estimates published in The Guardian. Nearly 70 percent of the dead who have been identified so far were women and children, according to a UN report.

“They Need People”

Although public refusers make up only a fraction of those Israelis who reject military service, their impact can be pronounced. Yesh Gvul, for example, was founded by reservists in response to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and was cited by then Chief of Staff Moshe Levi as contributing to Israel’s eventual withdrawal. (Israel’s currently ongoing invasion of Lebanon notwithstanding, the Israeli occupation persisted until 2000, when Hezbollah militants forced the Israeli military and its collaborators in the South Lebanese Army from all of Lebanon but Sheeba Farms, which Israel continues to occupy.) Similarly, refusers were cited by Israeli diplomat Dov Weisglass as contributing to the Israeli military’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005, following the Second Intifada (Arabic for “Uprising”) in which Palestinians challenged the Israeli occupation of Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

While the number of public refusers currently trails those during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the Second Intifada, the movement now is set to be bigger than those of the past, according to Ishai Menuchin, a spokesperson for Yesh Gvul.

“We cannot estimate the numbers,” Menuchin told Truthout. “We know it’s a big wave, but we don’t know how big is this wave.”

According to Menuchin, 3,000 reservists publicly pledged to refuse redeployment during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, and 2,500 did during the Second Intifada, but both took years of public organizing. While the current number of reservists publicly pledging to refuse deployment to Gaza is in the hundreds, he notes that they have emerged entirely organically, rather than as the result of a years-long public campaign, as was the case in the past. Furthermore, Menuchin points to other evidence of widespread private refusal: testimony received by Yesh Gvul from those newly released from military prison attesting to the facilities being full of deserters, government statistics reporting that the numbers of reservists appearing for duty is falling and the Israeli military’s recent efforts to conscript those traditionally exempt from service, such as the “ultra-Orthodox.”

The motivations of such refusers may run the gamut from moral opposition to self-preservation to religious tradition, but they all contribute to ending the Israeli genocide in Gaza, according to New Profile, another leftist organization that supports refusers.

“They need people,” Or, an activist with New Profile, tells Truthout, referring to the Israeli military. (As advocating for refusal is a crime in Israel, Or declined to share their last name.) “You can’t commit any kind of war crime without having people to do it. More people refusing means that there is less of an ability to commit war crimes — not in Lebanon, not in Iran, not in Gaza and not in the West Bank. It’s the most practical thing Israelis can do, saying no.”

For Behar Tsalik, publicly refusing to join the Israeli military was a decision he had made prior to receiving his first draft notice two years ago, in opposition Israel’s occupation of Palestine more broadly. He describes the genocide that Israel unleashed in Gaza after October 7, 2023, as providing only further evidence of what he had already come to believe beforehand.

“Some of my friends are fighters in the war right now,” said Behar Tsalik. “The stuff they’re doing is terrible, and I think it’s also doing terrible stuff to them. … There’s some stuff that you shy away from, and some stuff that you have to put your foot down and say, ‘I won’t.’”