How farming in the West Bank became a battle for survival and an act of resistance
LONDON: Abu Hassan was born in 1950 among the olive shrubs that his family had planted shortly after they were uprooted by the 1948 war. When he died last June, he was clutching a broken cane carved from the wood of those same trees.
His family says he died of “qahr” — heartbreak and oppression.
Before his death at age 75, Abu Hassan spent his life in Deir Istiya, a village in the northern West Bank where his family resettled after displacement.
A Palestinian farmer checks on spoiled plants in a maize field in the area of al-Hijreh near the village of Dura west of Hebron in the occupied West Bank on August 24, 2023. (AFP)
