In Gaza, ‘We will cultivate it with seeds of love and irrigate it with blood and tears’
Resilience endures amid devastation of food and education systems in Gaza
Dr. Ahmed Abu Shaban has seen his faculty building at Al-Azhar University in Gaza destroyed and rebuilt three times before Oct. 7, 2023. His father’s farm was also destroyed and rebuilt eight times before that date.
On Oct. 7, 2023, the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched a surprise attack on the occupied territory known as Israel, killing over a thousand Israeli civilians. In response, Israel’s retalitory military campaign continues, with the displacement of over 2 million Palestinians and 62,614 Palestinians killed to date.
“The beginning of the story was not the 7th of October,” Shaban said in a talk on March 7 at Concordia University’s De Sève Cinema.
The professor fled Gaza days after Oct. 7, 2023, and is now a visiting professor in the faculty of environmental and urban change at Toronto's York University, as well as an associate professor and dean at Gaza’s Al-Azhar.
“Gaza is the biggest open air prison,” Shaban continued. He explained that since 2006, roughly 2.2 million Gazans have lived in a “very small piece of land,” just 363 sq. km, under a strict siege with a severely limited flow of goods.
“It's very high level of unemployment, very high level of poverty, very high level of food insecurity, and that [was] all before the 7th of October,” Shaban said.
Starvation as a ‘method of warfare’
Before the genocide began, ongoing conflict, policy gaps, fragmented governance and blockade-induced financial limitations had weakened Gaza’s food systems. As of 2020, 70 per cent of Gaza’s greenhouses were partially or completely destroyed.
Israeli aerial spraying of herbicides that year damaged about 2.8 sq. km of agricultural land, with losses exceeding $US 1 million. Approximately 50 per cent of Gaza’s population was food insecure before October 2023.
The genocide in Gaza has dramatically worsened the situation for Palestinians across the strip. By March 2024, famine had taken hold in northern Gaza. Restrictions on the movement of goods, including food trucks, have drastically reduced food aid deliveries, exacerbating an already dire situation. Formal markets have collapsed, replaced by informal markets, with basic food items becoming scarce and prices soaring. Over 50 per cent of agricultural wells in the strip have been damaged since October 2023.
In a joint statement on March 6, over a dozen UN human rights experts said, “Creating unliveable conditions for the Palestinians under Israeli occupation appears to be Israel’s determination across the entire occupied Palestinian territory, from the decimated Gaza strip to the West Bank.”
The statement continued, “The annexation of territory by force is advancing at full speed in the West Bank, where refugee camps and cities are being bombed, depopulated and looted, and other areas are attacked by armed settlers with complicity of Israeli forces.”
In 2024, when issuing arrest warrants for Israeli leaders, the International Criminal Court found “reason to believe that Israel had used starvation as a method of warfare.”
“The systems are very fragile, and they are made to be fragile because the Israelis' target is to keep the system fragile,” Shaban told The Link. “And then when this [war] started, it was evident that we saw the system collapsing very quickly because it was designed to.”
Despite these severe challenges, community-based approaches to address food shortages have increased. These initiatives are based on mutual aid and use local knowledge, networks and resources.
Yousef Abu Rabee, one of Shaban’s students at Al-Azhar, started ‘حنزرعها’ (We Will Cultivate It) to rehabilitate his destroyed farm in Northern Gaza. His initiative focused on producing seedlings and distributing them to nearby farmers, as well as growing vegetables to feed the starving population.
Abu Rabee was just 24 when he was killed by an Israeli airstrike while working on his land.
“I knew that the Israelis would look at Yousef as a big threat,” Shaban said.
Abu Rabee’s brother, Amro, has sustained the initiative. The professor went on to quote from Abu Rabee’s Facebook profile: “We will cultivate it with seeds of love and irrigate it with blood and tears.”
Education under attack
Before 1967, there were no universities in Palestinian territories.
Yes, the Israelis destroyed our buildings, they destroyed our infrastructure, but they did not destroy the institutions—because the institutions are not the buildings, the institutions are the community. — Dr. Ahmed Abu Shaban
Shaban said that Palestinian students would pursue higher education abroad, studying the histories of other cultures rather than their own. He added that, after Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank, restrictions on movement and financial hardship made it increasingly difficult for Palestinian students to access education overseas. In response, grassroots efforts led to the creation of Palestinian universities.
Now, Shaban’s fourth-floor office at Al-Azhar is rubble.
All universities and educational infrastructure in Gaza have been destroyed or shut down. The education of 88,000 higher education students has been disrupted and 5,000 university staff have been displaced with no income, with thousands more being targeted by Israeli forces.
It’s a dire situation that UN human rights experts call scholasticide—the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.
“[Education is] a part of our national identity,” Shaban said. “This is something that Israelis don't want to see. And they feel this is a threat. And therefore, in a systematic way, they are targeting the education sector in Palestine in general.”
According to the professor, Israel views an independent Palestinian education system as a direct challenge to its control.
“It is a means for building the capacity of our young generations to build our independent state,” Shaban said. “They have been targeting our education system [for] a very long time.”
He added that Palestinian students and faculty have taken extraordinary measures to keep education going. Shaban teaches online classes to his students in Gaza, where his university has seen over 10,000 students enroll in classes despite the war.
“Our hero professors in Gaza, they lived in tents. Some of them, they had to walk five kilometres to get an internet connection to upload the lecture for the students to see,” Shaban said.
According to Shaban, five of the university’s engineering students were attacked and killed when doing an assignment at an internet point. He has students who have asked him questions about his lectures over WhatsApp from the hospital, surrounded by Israeli tanks that were threatening them to leave.
“Yes, the Israelis destroyed our buildings, they destroyed our infrastructure, but they did not destroy the institutions—because the institutions are not the buildings, the institutions are the community,” Shaban said. “And we are still there, and we will resume our mission on the ground of Gaza.”
Dr. Kevin Gould is an associate professor in the faculty of geography, planning and environment at Concordia. He facilitated the talk on March 7.
“I think we have to put the ongoing genocide that Israel is perpetrating against people in Gaza and in Palestine at the centre,” Gould told The Link. “These are our colleagues—these students, these professors, some of whom were murdered—[from] universities that were destroyed systematically one by one.”
For Shaban, education is the hope for the future.
“Whenever I just talk to my students back home in Gaza, I just wonder sometimes, how come in such difficult situations they are still committed and they still would like to invest in education, this time and effort?” Shaban said. “I just get the feeling that they feel, with their education, they still just see there is hope for them.”
