Gaza seed bank preserves hope and food sovereignty amid humanitarian crisis

Salama Ayesh Muhanna was seventeen when he first planted cucumbers on his family's land in al-Qarara, Gaza. The memory stays with him still—the simple joy of watching seeds become food, of understanding himself as someone rooted in the earth. Now seventy-one, an agronomist and community leader, he tends a different kind of garden, one born from loss and necessity.

Before 2024, Muhanna ran the Al-Qarara Seed Bank from a proper facility near Gaza's eastern border, with storage, equipment, olive trees on his own land, and a collection of forty-two local seed varieties carefully preserved. The Israeli military campaign destroyed it all. Everything flattened. Everything gone. Muhanna was displaced to Deir al-Balah, where he and his daughter Hanadi, thirty-eight, have rebuilt the seed bank from scratch—this time in a tent in a displacement camp, under summer temperatures that climb to thirty-five degrees Celsius.

Their workspace is modest: a two-hundred-metre plot of land where they live, collect seeds, and experiment with new crops. Each morning Muhanna rises early to inspect the seeds for quality, water the plants, check on seedlings. Hanadi manages relationships with local farmers and oversees the growing collection while studying agriculture and food sovereignty online through a programme connected to Coventry University and the Gaza Urban Agriculture Forum. The work is relentless and precise. Muhanna jokes that his daughter will be managing him by next year.

The seed bank operates on two principles. First, it preserves local plant varieties—what Palestinians call baladi seeds—that have proven more resilient than imported crops. These seeds resist drought, fungi, and pests in ways that commercial varieties cannot. During the war, Muhanna says, they became a lifeline. The blockade on seed imports, the rocketing food prices, the spreading hunger across Gaza forced farmers back toward what their land had always known. Second, the bank distributes seeds to farmers and families who cannot afford to buy new stock. The arrangement is simple: farmers receive seeds, grow them, and return an equivalent amount after harvest. About two hundred farmers have benefited so far, supported by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The numbers tell part of the story. Before the war, the seed bank held forty-two local varieties. Now it holds twenty-eight. Yet there is also progress: they have collected almost two and a half tonnes of seeds this year, better than last. Each seed carries weight beyond its agricultural function. Muhanna speaks of a pumpkin plant that reminds him of his father and mother, of the vineyard where he lived as a child. The seeds are memory made tangible, Palestinian agricultural heritage preserved against monopolies and erasure.

But the context is brutal. At least 1.2 million people in Gaza now face acute food insecurity, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification. Israel continues to block access to agricultural land and restricts the import of seeds and organic fertiliser. Water supplies are dwindling. Soil is degraded. Unexploded ordnance makes farming dangerous—walking in the streets is unsafe, and walking on the land is unsafe, Muhanna says. The psychological toll is real. The war destroyed his hope.

Yet the work continues. Muhanna and Hanadi experiment in their fields to identify which local seeds produce the best yields, racing against time and climate. Climate change itself has become a controlling force—when the weather turns hot, seeds spoil. Planting sometimes happens a month later than normal, compressing the window for harvest. Still they persist, understanding their labour as something larger than survival. Pat Griffiths, the ICRC's spokesperson in Jerusalem, frames it plainly: this is about agency, about dignity, about being less dependent on what authorities permit to enter Gaza. As the occupying power, Israel has an obligation to ensure Palestinians have access to food and goods they need to live.

Muhanna's vision extends beyond the immediate crisis. Food sovereignty, he argues, is the foundation of nationhood. Any country without control over its own food security is not truly a country. If Palestinians establish that sovereignty, he says, then they will be a real country. With each seed collected, preserved, and distributed, that possibility takes root—fragile, threatened by climate and blockade, but growing.