Gaza farmers battle to rebuild as WFP warns of West Bank settler violence
These growers include Taysir Dahdouh, whose farm in the Zeytun neighbourhood, east of Gaza City, is a little smaller than a football pitch. His land was once covered with greenhouses, but they’ve been destroyed or lost during the conflict that erupted on 7 October 2023. Today, he needs tools, seeds, fertilizer and water to grow the cucumbers and tomatoes he used to.
UN News
Taysir Dahdouh, a Palestinian farmer, works on his farmland, which was rehabilitated following the ceasefire in Gaza.
200 new homesAlessandro Mrakic, Head of the Gaza Office for the UN Development Programme (UNDP), told UN News’s correspondent in the enclave that families who had once lived in one heavily bombed area had had to move multiple times before returning. “We have provided 200 relief housing units to provide shelter to the families who came back and started, as you see behind me, agriculture – started producing eggplants, tomatoes, molokhia, among others,” he said.The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Thursday it has scaled up its cash assistance programme to help around 1,500 Palestinian farmers cultivate land across Gaza during the 2026 planting season, enough to produce fresh vegetables for more than 100,000 people.Not enough spaceBut FAO warned that farmers “are squeezed into rapidly shrinking space” amid ongoing Israeli military activity, and it is calling for access to land, sea and production inputs including seeds, fertilizers, irrigation equipment and fishing gear.Elsewhere, Deputy Special Coordinator for the peace process Ramiz Alakbarov welcomed new commitments worth almost $58 million from eight Member States to the UN Horizon Fund, and called on further partners to join the initiative. The World Food Programme (WFP) said people forced to move within Gaza risk losing access to basic services and called for safe access to reach those in need; despite the obstacles, it and its partners reached more than a quarter of a million people across 36 distribution sites in the first 12 days of this month.
