 |
Ghada Abdulfattah Figs
grow again in Sheikh Ijlin, on the southwest edge of Gaza City, after
farms there were destroyed by Israeli attacks since 2023. |
When Jumaa Abed Saad returned to his farm in Sheikh Ijlin in January 2025 after more than a year of displacement, the place that greeted him was nearly unrecognizable. His house looked like a crumbled concrete cookie, with its blown-apart walls, roof, and floors scattered across the ground. Nearby, the neat rows of grapevines and fig trees his family had tended for three generations had vanished under piles of rubble. The grass towered above his head.
“Everything [was] gone,” he says of the farm in Sheikh Ijlin, a neighborhood on the southwest edge of Gaza City renowned for its grapes and figs.
Or so it appeared. But as Mr. Saad and his sons cleared the debris and dug into the sandy earth, they found something extraordinary: roots. For three years, as Israeli bombs made ruins of the ground, some of the trees and vines had clung to life in the spongy layer of clay below.
“Grapevines and fig trees don’t always give up as easily as they look like they have,” Mr. Saad says.
The taste of home
It is this quirk of soil, more than anything else, that has made this small corner of Gaza famous for grapes and figs for generations. Plant a vine or tree, and its roots reach down through the sand until they find the clay beneath. Through the driest months of summer, when nothing else in the ground has water left to give, the clay remains moist enough up to keep the tree alive... READ MORE https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2026/1002/gaza-rebuilding-ceasefire-farming-figs-grapes-sheikh-ijlin