[CAIRO] When Youssef Abu Rabie, a young agricultural engineer, returned to northern Gaza in March, his home had gone and his once flourishing farmland was completely destroyed.

After the fighting broke out in October, he had sought refuge from Israeli forces in Jabalia camp, north of Gaza City, and then near Al-Shifa Hospital, in western Gaza.

“The occupation forces ordered us to go to the south, but some of us returned to the north, motivated by the pursuit of renewed of hope in life,” says Abu Rabie, one of 20 farmers now working together to grow food amid the rubble of decimated homes, schools and hospitals in the city of Beit Lahia.

Famine is imminent in the northern part of the Gaza Strip, where around 300,000 people are trapped, the UN has warned. In Gaza as a whole, 1.1 million people are struggling with catastrophic hunger having completely exhausted their food supplies, according to a food security report published in March.

The food aid that reaches the Gaza Strip through checkpoints and airdrops is “nothing but a morsel”, according to Abu Rabie.

Residents in Beit Lahia go out early in the morning searching for food in the hope of “snatching a meal” before others, he says.

It’s a dangerous quest and he himself came under attack of gunfire during one such attempt. Despite no longer being occupied by Israeli forces, the city nevertheless remains under constant threat of aerial and artillery bombardment, he explains.

However, one day Abu Rabie noticed some small plants that had grown from pepper and aubergine pods falling into the soil, which had been watered by the winter rains.

That’s when he realised there may be another solution.

“We collected these small seedlings and created what looked like incubators for them using plastic containers that were available on top of what was left of the rubble of our house, and we tried to take care of them as much as possible so that they could grow, with the aim of replanting them on agricultural land.”

One of the many challenges he faced in doing this was the need for “artificial soil”.

Natural soil, rich in nutrients that promote plant growth, has been destroyed by the war, Abu Rabie explains. The land in Gaza has been subjected to bulldozing and bombardment with missiles and phosphorus bombs, according to agricultural specialists in the country.

In a trip Abu Rabie says was “fraught with danger” he travelled to various parts of the enclave to obtain this artificial soil, returning with five bags of a soil made from tree waste, treated to make it suitable for agricultural use.

He and his brother and neighbours also collected ten different types of seeds, including peppers, aubergine, pumpkin and red squash to plant in the makeshift nursery.

Fearing reprisals from Israeli forces, Abu Rabie was reluctant to draw attention to the initiative, but eventually he publicised his work on Facebook in the hope of spreading the idea and feeding more people.

Three days later, the nursery, established above the remains of his bombed home, was subjected to artillery shelling.

Abu Rabie and the other farmers are now trying to prepare agricultural land to receive new seedlings, grown in another small nursery.

“We plant despite all the risks and we ask all officials and stakeholders to protect farmers who can only live and provide food, especially the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which previously contributed to developing the agricultural sector in Gaza.”

SciDev.Net spoke to a number of agricultural officials to find out whether they thought the initiative was viable.

Mahmoud Fatafta, director general of International, Public Relations and Information at the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture, said they would encourage partner institutions such as the FAO and the Union of Agricultural Work Committees in Palestine to support it.

Azzam Saleh, director of the FAO programme in Gaza and the West Bank, says the organisation is currently giving priority to distributing animal feed to help save livestock and produce milk and meat.

“In the near future, we hope to distribute other production inputs when conditions permit,” he adds.

Khaled Ghanem, professor of organic agriculture and head of the Department of Environment and Biodynamic Agriculture at the Faculty of Agriculture at Al-Azhar University in Egypt, says the initiative could help provide some basic food for Gaza residents.

Ghanem points out that a similar experiment was successful in the US during World War I, and received support from the government, intellectuals, and scientists, resulting in the planting of about 18 million gardens.

More recently, a project known as “Victory Gardens” was successful in Ukraine during the Russia-Ukraine war.

“However, the success of the experiment in Gaza requires the solidarity of the relevant organisations locally and internationally,” says Ghanem.

A Palestinian agricultural expert, who wishes to remain anonymous, warned, however, of major challenges.

“From a technical standpoint, it may be difficult, to some extent, to germinate the seeds we obtain from crops, which are called the second generation, and we do not yet know the extent of the readiness of Gaza’s agricultural soil,” he says.

He fears that the arrival of summer and shortage of water could jeopardise the project.

“The initiative is inspiring, but its success is conditional on the cessation of the occupation’s attacks on life in general in the Gaza Strip,” Ghanem adds.

This article was produced by SciDev.Net’s Middle East and North Africa edition and edited for brevity and clarity.