From Gaza’s Ruins To Zimbabwe’s Fields: How Farmers Grow Food In War And Climate Crisis
At dawn in Gaza City, where streets are lined with rubble instead of shopfronts, a 43-year-old man bends over a strip of soil where his tent once stood. One leg is missing. The other is braced carefully in the dust. Beside him, a young girl presses pumpkin seeds into the ground.
This is how Mohammed Ansir, declared dead once and pulled back from the edge of burial, now measures survival: not in days or aid parcels, but in the number of leaves that push through war‑scarred sand.
Across the Gaza Strip, war has turned orchards into craters and greenhouses into twisted metal. Yet some people, like Ansir and young chef‑farmer Mohammed Amer, are still coaxing life from the soil — even while displaced. Their story carries a hard truth, and a quiet lesson, for African smallholders facing their own storms of drought, conflict, and economic strain.
What Does Food Security Look Like When The Land Is A Battlefield?
Before the war, writer and student Ghada Abu Muaileq’s home garden in central Gaza was a sanctuary. Bougainvillea climbed the walls, flowers in every colour crowded the corners, and a pomegranate tree brought years of harvest from a nursery in Beit Lahia — once known as the Strip’s food basket.
When the bombing intensified, beauty gave way to survival. The flowers were uprooted. Onions went into the beds to ease hunger and escape soaring prices. The pomegranate tree stayed — a living memory of an agricultural city whose lands were bulldozed and whose residents were barred from returning.
Beit Lahia and nearby Beit Hanoun, which used to supply much of Gaza with fruits and vegetables, are now devastated terrain. Satellite analyses by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the UN Satellite Centre show that up to 98 percent of fruit‑bearing tree cropland — olives, pomegranates, and more — has been destroyed, alongside more than 87 percent of overall cropland and over 80 percent of greenhouses. Only an estimated 1.5 to 4 percent of the Strip’s agricultural land remains both accessible and undamaged, mostly in limited southern pockets.
This isn’t random fallout. It’s a direct assault on food systems and livelihoods — what many environmental experts are now calling ecocide.
FFA Explainer:
Ecocide refers to widespread or long‑term destruction of the natural environment, such that it severely disrupts the ability of people and ecosystems to live and regenerate. While not yet a universally recognised crime in international law, it’s increasingly used to describe deliberate, large‑scale damage to land, water, and biodiversity.
How Do People Farm When They Are Living In Tents?
In central Gaza, groves that once produced olive oil every autumn are now crowded with canvas. Landowners cut down their trees to make space for tents sheltering families uprooted from the north. Land that fed the Strip became an emergency camp.
Yet some Gazans refuse to surrender their bond with the soil. Among them is Chef Mohammed Amer, whose simple, self‑sufficient recipes shared on Instagram during the famine drew global attention. Very often, he cooked what he managed to grow beside his tent.
“Some of my experience in farming I gained from my grandparents and my family, whose origins trace back to the village of Beit Daras, from which they were expelled during the Nakba in 1948,” Amer explained. “In 2023, my grandmother was destined to live through displacement and Nakba for the second time, to live in a tent and endure famine again, but in a harsher and more difficult way.”
During this second displacement, Amer started planting next to the tent — pumpkins, tomatoes, whatever he could manage.
“The main goal of my interest in agriculture was to relieve myself and reduce the stress and anxiety resulting from psychological warfare,” he said.
Seeds were hard to find. Shops ran empty. Sometimes he saved seeds from market vegetables; other times farmers slipped him a handful from their last stocks. Water was scarce, the soil thin and lifeless, the air thick with explosive toxins and gases.
“In the beginning, it was hard to farm barren land,” Amer recalled. “I also faced significant difficulty protecting the plants from environmental pollution caused by explosive toxins and gases in the air due to the bombardment. The biggest challenge for me was protecting the plants from the environmental contamination that spread during the war.”
Still, the plants grew. Slowly. Stubbornly.
“I became convinced that the greatest bond a person can have is with their land — holding onto it and giving it care until a very strong connection forms,” he said. “What it produces becomes a great reward for my patience and effort in nurturing it. This is what made my family and me more resilient in the face of the siege we endure in Gaza.”
What Can Zimbabwean Farmers Learn From Gaza’s Makeshift Gardens?
The wars and politics are different. Yet the feelings are familiar to many African farmers: land suddenly out of reach, seasons that don’t behave, prices that jump overnight, and the constant need to improvise.
In Zimbabwe, climate change has become its own kind of silent assault on food security. Droughts bite harder, cyclones cut through fields, and power cuts and input shortages make each planting season feel like a gamble. Still, as Gaza’s tent gardens show, farmers don’t stop innovating when conditions worsen. They invent new ways to grow in the cracks.
Near Chiredzi, in Zimbabwe’s Lowveld, 34‑year‑old farmer [Name Withheld] [VERIFY: farmer name and location] has spent the past three seasons rethinking what a field should look like. Where a neat block of maize used to stand, she now runs small raised beds of vegetables between drought‑tolerant sorghum and cowpeas. Grey water from dishwashing runs into banana circles; used grain bags are turned into sack gardens for tomatoes and spinach.
“We can’t depend on one big crop anymore,” she told FFA. “If the rain fails, you lose everything at once. So I copied ideas from sack gardens and refugee camps I saw online and made my own version here at home.” [Illustrative — verify or replace]
Her approach mirrors some of the Gaza strategies, even if the triggers are different. In both places, smallholders are making tough shifts that development reports rarely capture:
- Turning ornamental spaces into food gardens, as Ghada did when she uprooted flowers to plant onions.
- Saving and swapping seeds when formal markets collapse, like Amer hunting for tomato and pumpkin seeds among neighbours.
- Using every drop of available water — whether trucked in under siege or carried from a distant borehole.
- Leaning on intergenerational knowledge, with grandparents teaching younger farmers how to read the soil and stretch scarce inputs.
These are not just coping mechanisms. They are blueprints for resilience in a world where the shocks — from bombs to failed rains — are coming faster.
How Does Conflict Destroy Food Systems Beyond The Farm Gate?
In Gaza, the damage goes far beyond scorched trees. According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Environmental Quality Authority, three out of every four residents are now drinking contaminated water. In the north, access to safe water is almost nonexistent.
Wastewater treatment plants have collapsed. Massive volumes of untreated sewage are flowing into the Mediterranean, and hazardous waste is piling up across the territory. All of this feeds back into agriculture: soils become contaminated, fish stocks suffer, and the very conditions needed for farming — clean water, healthy land, predictable seasons — start to erode.
Agriculture officials in Harare watching these reports may seem far removed from Gaza’s shattered greenhouses. Yet the pattern is uncomfortably familiar to anyone who followed Cyclone Idai’s impact on Zimbabwe and Mozambique in 2019: flooded fields, broken irrigation infrastructure, contaminated wells, and long‑term soil damage.
Under Zimbabwe’s National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1), agriculture is meant to be a driver of inclusive growth and export earnings. But NDS1 also recognises that without resilient infrastructure — from dams and boreholes to cold chains and rural roads — farmers are one shock away from disaster. Gaza shows what happens when that infrastructure isn’t just neglected, but deliberately targeted.
FFA Explainer:
NDS1 is Zimbabwe’s medium‑term development plan for 2021–2025. It aims to transform the country into an upper middle‑income economy by 2030, in part by modernising agriculture, improving irrigation, and strengthening value chains. For smallholders, this should mean better access to inputs, markets, and climate‑smart technologies — if fully implemented.
Where Do Women And Youth Fit Into This Story Of Survival Farming?
Ghada’s pomegranate tree, her mother’s flowers, Amer’s grandmother tending crops through two cycles of displacement — the thread is clear. Women are often the custodians of home gardens and seed traditions, even in the middle of war.
Across Africa, including Zimbabwe, that pattern holds. Women dominate vegetable production, seed selection, and household nutrition, yet receive a smaller share of formal land rights, bank credit, and extension services. Youth, meanwhile, are frequently told to leave the land for the city.
Gaza’s tent farms tell another story: when formal systems break down, it’s often women and young people who keep food production alive with backyard, container, and micro‑plot farming. That’s exactly the kind of innovation AU Agenda 2063 and the UN Sustainable Development Goals say should be supported, not sidelined.
Agenda 2063’s vision of “a prosperous Africa based on inclusive growth and sustainable development” only becomes real if these small, quiet plots are taken seriously — with investment in water harvesting, climate‑smart seed varieties, and digital platforms that connect growers like Amer or our Chiredzi farmer to advice and buyers.
Platforms such as mobile advisory services, community seed banks, and nutrition‑sensitive agriculture programmes are starting to emerge in Zimbabwe. Yet Gaza’s experience is a sharp reminder: resilience isn’t only about technologies. It’s also about rights — to land, water, and physical safety.
How Should Policy Makers Respond When Land Itself Becomes A Target?
At the International People’s Tribunal on Palestine, prosecutors have described the deliberate destruction of farms and water sources as a form of ecocide. Their arguments sit uncomfortably alongside FAO’s satellite images of brown, dead fields where orchards once stood.
For African policy makers and farmer organisations watching from afar, including those in Zimbabwe’s Parliament and local councils, Gaza raises hard questions:
- How are we protecting our own productive land — not only from climate hazards, but from pollution, mining, and poorly planned infrastructure?
- Are early warning systems and insurance schemes reaching the smallholder at the edge of the field, or just the commercial estate?
- Do our agricultural policies recognise home gardens, school gardens, and micro‑plots as part of national food systems, or ignore them because they don’t show up clearly in statistics?
Under the UN Sustainable Development Goals, especially SDG 2 on Zero Hunger and SDG 15 on Life on Land, governments have already committed to protect ecosystems and boost food security. But those goals will remain slogans unless budgets shift to back up farmers like Amer — and the countless Zimbabwean equivalents who are planting in tough conditions from Tsholotsho to Chipinge.
That means:
- Investing in community‑level irrigation and water harvesting that can keep micro‑gardens alive during long dry spells.
- Supporting local seed systems so farmers aren’t stranded when formal supply chains fail.
- Expanding extension services that focus not only on yields, but on soil health and nutrition, including backyard and sack gardens.
- Protecting agricultural land from activities that poison or permanently degrade it, and holding polluters to account.
Why Do Stories Like A Single Pomegranate Tree Matter?
Towards the end of her account, Ghada returns to the tree in her yard — the one her family refused to cut, even as they turned flowers into onions.
“Yet the pomegranate tree in our garden still stands,” she writes. “Within its silent roots remains a promise — that what was once planted in this land will not be uprooted from memory.”
Amer hears the same message in his tent‑side farm and his wartime recipes. “These recipes I have shared will remain a testament to our resilience and strength,” he said, “and they show my followers around the world the authenticity of Palestinian cuisine, the simplicity of its ingredients, and its diversity.”
On a small plot outside Gweru, a Zimbabwean widow [VERIFY: profile details] tends an old mango tree that survived Cyclone Idai’s winds. Beneath its shade, she has laid out tyre gardens of covo and tsunga, using cut‑off plastic bottles as drippers. To her, that tree is more than fruit. It’s proof that the land — and those who work it — can come back from almost anything.
For farmers from Gaza to Zimbabwe, trees and gardens are not just assets on a balance sheet. They are anchors of identity, quiet forms of resistance, and blueprints for how we might feed ourselves in a harsher century. When we count the costs of war or climate disaster, we should count every felled orchard and uprooted garden too.
Because somewhere, in the middle of rubble or a drought‑cracked field, a farmer is still putting seeds into the ground — betting that the future will be kinder than the present. Our policies, investments, and solidarity should make sure that bet is not in vain.
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