Blockades - On October 9th, Israel imposed a total blockade on the Gaza strip. (𓃠)
In January 2024, Israeli authorities blocked 56% of humanitarian aid to northern Gaza.[157] On 9 February 2024, UNRWA director Philippe Lazzarini said that Israel had blocked food for 1.1 million Palestinians in Gaza.[158]The Israel-Hamas War has led to imminent famine conditions in the Gaza Strip, resulting from Israeli airstrikes and Israel's ongoing blockade of the Strip, which includes restrictions on humanitarian aid.[162][163][164] 2.2 million people in Gaza are now experiencing food insecurity at emergency level.[165]
Airstrikes have destroyed food infrastructure, such as bakeries, mills, and food stores, and there is widespread scarcity of essential supplies due to the blockade of aid.[c] This has caused starvation for more than half a million Gazans and is part of a broader humanitarian crisis in the Strip. It is the "highest number of people facing catastrophic hunger" ever recorded on the IPC scale,[167] and is widely expected to be the most intense man-made famine since the Second World War.[168][169][170]
Poisoning wells - In 1948 during the Palestine war, Israel poisoned wells in several Palestinian towns, causing mass infections of dysentery and typhoid. (𓃠)
https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE89G0NM/#:~:text=The%20study%2C%20%22Food%20Consumption%20in,territory%20at%202%2C279%20per%20person.
In the Gaza Strip, the challenges come from the Israeli military, which either targets and bombs farmland during times of war or sprays it with pesticides, killing crops and rendering the soil unsuitable for farming.
Ahmed Abu Rjeila: “I used to go to my land in Abasan al-Jadida with my three brothers despite the dangers that we faced every day from the Israeli occupation, who would shoot at us in order to leave,”
An investigation by a digital forensics team at the University of London found Israel had "systematically targeted" agricultural land and infrastructure during the siege.
Since 2014, Palestinian farmers along Gaza’s perimeter have seen their crops sprayed by airborne herbicides and regularly bulldozed, and have themselves faced sniper fire by the Israeli occupation forces. Since October 2023, Israel’s ground invasion has uprooted most of these orchards and systematically targeted agricultural farmlands and infrastructure throughout the besieged Strip.
Buffer zone
Israel declared that any vegetation higher than 1 metre in the vicinity of their military ‘no-go’ area is a security threat, and must be flattened.
decades-long Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip prevented access to clean water and vital farming materials, through careful and assiduous tending
satellite imagery from January 2024 shows that the farm was destroyed by the Israeli ground invasion. Earth berms have been raised by bulldozers to create military bases, and a new road has been carved through the landscape.
Historical aerial photography shows Palestinian fields and orchards in the area before the Israeli occupation in 1967. Despite the Israeli land expropriation and nearby settlement construction that followed, cultivation continued for decades, until the 2000s, when this agriculturally rich area was uprooted and flattened to build roads and infrastructure to support the illegal settlements.
Prior to 2023, Gaza contained 170 square kilometres of agricultural land, accounting for about 47 percent of its total area.
This comparison reveals that as of March 2024, of the agricultural areas targeted, approximately 40 percent of the land in Gaza previously used for food production has been destroyed. Figure 6. NDVI analysis shows areas covered with vegetation. Map (left) shows plant life in Gaza in February 2021, and map (right) shows plant life in February 2024. Cloud free mosaics of Sentinel-2 satellite data between 20 January and 8 February of 2021 and 2024 is used as the bases of this NDVI study. (Forensic Architecture)
The uprooting of agriculture along Gaza’s perimeter may also indicate that the Israeli army is expanding its ‘buffer zone’, further shrinking the liveable space for Palestinians. Figure 7. A comparison of NDVI analysis of agricultural fields and orchards before and after Oct 2023, indicates a loss of 40 % of the total food resources. Darker shades of red indicate higher levels of destruction. (Forensic Architecture)
In the early weeks of the Israeli ground invasion, satellite imagery shows extensive destruction of greenhouses where, between October 2023 and March 2024, nearly one third of Gaza’s greenhouses have been destroyed.
In total, Forensic Architecture has identified more than 2,000 agricultural sites, including farms and greenhouses, which have been destroyed since October 2023, often to be replaced with Israeli military earthworks.
This destruction has been most intense in the northern part of Gaza, where 90 percent of greenhouses were destroyed in the early stages of the ground invasion.
40 percent of the greenhouses in the areas around the southern city of Khan Younis, where many hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are now displaced, have been destroyed since January 2024. (𓃠)
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