Gaza’s vanishing date harvest
Tareq S. Hajjaj reports in Mondoweiss on 5 November 2026:
For 38-year-old Abdullah Baraka, harvesting date palms has been his livelihood for more than a decade. But this season, he only managed to harvest around 70 trees. Before the war, he would harvest approximately 5,000 palms during the harvest season in the Khan Younis area, working alongside a team of 14 other laborers.
Their work extended far beyond harvesting dates. Throughout the year, they visited farms and individual palm tree owners more than seven times, providing services such as pollination, pruning, trimming, and eventually harvesting the fruit.
Baraka says he has watched date palms become increasingly vulnerable to destruction with each passing year of the war. He fears that within the next three years, there may be no harvest season at all. “By then, the date-palm harvest season will be a thing of the past,” he said.
During the war, the Israeli army destroyed approximately 4,500 dunams cultivated with date palms. Large farms in Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah were destroyed by bombardment, targeted attacks, or bulldozing, particularly those located inside the so-called “yellow line”, which divides the Gaza Strip into two parts
In the Qarara area of Khan Younis, where Baraka used to work, some families owned plots with 100 to 150 trees. Their owners relied on these trees as an investment, while workers like Baraka regularly visited the farms to maintain them.