Bitter harvest: Gaza farmer struggles to save olive crop amid Israel's war

Mohamed Omar was in a race against time. The 47-year-old farmer has been grateful for what little of his farmland is still standing in Gaza, following a year of Israeli razing, bombing and violence that has killed, burned and uprooted most of the enclave's agricultural land.

With the harvest season of his precious olive trees upon him, Omar has been worried about any impending Israeli raids that could strip him and his family, once again, of irreplaceable income.

His concerns were not unfounded. Omar's two-donum (2,000 squre metres) farmland is located in northern Khan Younis, which Israel has been relentlessly pounding under the pretext that this is the location of Yahya Sinwar, the newly named top leader of Hamas.

So in his haste to salvage what he could of the crop, Omar decided to harvest it early. But he could not convince any other farmer to sneak into the dangerous battlefield.

So instead, he took his two eldest sons, 13-year-old Yassin, and 11-year-old Youssef, to give him a hand. For five days, the family worked from dawn to dusk in early August, gathering the harvest from largely-damaged trees.

Omar said he was terrified they'd be spotted in the deserted region, which displaced families had abandoned days before due to Israeli warnings.

Speaking to TRT World, he said, "Those trees are our lives. I wouldn't have gone there risking my life and those of my kids if we had any other source of income. The little we can make from those olives is my yearly income." Omar's youngest son, who is only three years old, remained with his mother in the coastal district of al-Mawasi.

As of September 1, 2024, nearly 68 percent of Gaza's farmland has been damaged by the bombs which Israel has rained upon the enclave since October 7, 2023, killing at least 42,000 people, displacing the entirety of the population, and leaving most of them struggling to find food.

According to satellite images gathered by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), "heavy vehicle tracks, razing, shelling, and other conflict-related pressures have also significantly damaged Gaza's agricultural infrastructure," including agricultural wells and greenhouses.

A lifeline and more

But out of all fruits and vegetables grown in Gaza, for Palestinians, olives stand alone. The fruit bears unrivalled significance in the Palestinian culture.

Its trees signify Palestinians' bond to their land, with many people seeing their own resilience mirrored in the trees' sturdiness, and olive oil is a staple on dining tables and has become woven into proverbs and cultural sayings as a symbol of life.

So olive harvest season is a time of year that is widely celebrated by Palestinians, and its yield of pickled olives, olive oil and other extractions typically trickle into every home as farmers gift them to friends and family.

Omar holds a degree in sociology, but wasn't able to secure a stable job because of the constrained job market, which has been under Israeli siege for 18 years. For him, his olive trees hold another layer of significance: they have been his family's main source of income.

"Each year, my trees made me some 14 gallons of olive oil, in addition to the olives I sold as a whole. This year, all I got was 1.5 gallons of oil, so there's no income to sustain my family and I," said the farmer, as he pointed at jerrycans (fuel containers) of olive oil in his displacement tent.

According to Muhammad Abu Odeh, agricultural expert in the horticulture sector, roughly 10,000 farmers like Omar work year-round to care for Gaza's olive trees, relying on their harvest for a living.

The number quadruples during the harvest season, with day workers lending a hand to gather the crop. "All those, and their families, were all left without income this year," Abu Odeh told TRT World.

Omar will sadly be among them.

"Five days of tedious work for my sons and I, and taking extreme risk, but not earning a single dime," Omar said in despair. "Half the trees dried up because of lack of watering. There's no electricity or fuel to work the irrigation system and the Israeli ground invasion made it impossible to attend to the farmland," he added.

Shattered dreams

Omar's crushed hopes in his olive harvest speak of the toll endured by a production that thrived in Gaza until a year ago.

According to Fayyad Fayyad, the director general of the Palestinian Olive and Olive Oil Council in Gaza, the enclave witnessed "qualitative leaps" in olive cultivation and related industries since 2017, and was headed towards becoming "one of the leading olive countries in 2030."

Speaking to TRT World, he said Gaza's peak annual production reached about 50,000 tons of olives and 5,000 tons of oil, making it "one of the world's most distinguished olive producers."

"One donum (1,000 square metres) produces 1,200 kilograms (of olives), which is one of the highest productivities in the region and eight times what is produced, for example, in the West Bank, where one dunum produces 150 kilograms," Fayyad noted, attributing this to Gazan farmers' experience, the quality of the soil, the olive varieties, and regular irrigation.

Abu Odeh said that 80 percent of this production was lost due to the war. "Gaza had around 2 million olive trees on an area of ​​50,000 dunams before the war, of which only 380,000 trees remain on an area of ​​9,500 dunams. so production decreased from 40,000 tons of olives to 7500 tons," he explained.

In terms of olive oil production, Fayyad noted that out of 40 olive presses operating in Gaza, days before the outbreak of the war, only nine presses are operative today.

"Some of those were repaired by collecting their spare parts from a destroyed press. The rest were severely damaged by bombing, or did not receive enough olives to operate for, as is the case in Beit Lahia and Beit Hanoun in northern Gaza," he said.

In previous seasons, presses would take days to go through snaking queues of farmers with their countless containers of their green, bead-like crops. Today, most presses are deserted, or whiz through their clients' meagre harvest.

"Presses' operation costs have also surged," Fayyad added.

Since Israel cut power to Gaza last October, diesel has been in high demand. This has caused the price of pressing olives to 1,500 shekels ($399) in southern Gaza and double that amount in the north, he added.

According to Fayyad, Gazan farmers had managed in recent years to sell their olive oil in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, despite the Israeli blockade. "It was planned for the same route with Qatar to open after the surplus production, but the war came in the way,” he said.

Mourning the loss of a staple

All this - the war on Gaza, farmers' inability to tend to crops, the destruction of most farmland and the price inflation on locally produced olive oil - has now made the cherished staple unattainable to the majority of Gaza's population.

Head of Khan Younis' Agricultural Cooperative Society Nahed Al-Astal noted that the price of a gallon of local olive oil has more than doubled in the current season, from 400 shekels ($106) to more than 1,000 shekels ($266) per gallon, and people are relying more on the imported products being allowed into the the enclave.

He also predicted long-lasting damage to Gaza's future olive production.

"If the war stops, and water, irrigation network tools, fertilisers, pesticides and seedlings were made available, we would need to start planting olives again and wait for their initial production, which would take five years," he explained.

For farmer Omar, so much hinged on his beloved trees' resilience. He mourned his financial losses and the loss of an opportunity to experience a glimpse of joy which he and his family have been eagerly waiting for as they celebrated each harvest season.

"We needed this," he remarked. "For so many reasons, we needed this."

This piece was published in collaboration with Egab.