Amro Rashad Abo Aisha & Nour Abo Aisha
The Electronic Intifada / August 19, 2026
When asked, Muhammad Shamalakh, a farmer from Sheikh Ajlin, a neighbourhood in southern Gaza City, can rattle off with ease all the popular Palestinian sayings about figs and grapes.
“When your grapes and figs are ripe,” he said, “everyone wants to be your friend.”
And, famously: “In the month of August, harvest your grapes without fear.”
He also explains that there is another saying, “about a man whose wife depends on him for firewood” but instead “he brings home fig wood.”
Muhammad explains that fig wood does not burn well.
“We struggle with that today,” he says, “but that is the reality.”
Muhammad does not know the exact year when his family’s vineyards in Sheikh Ajlin were first planted.
Yet he cannot remember a time in his life when there were no vineyards.
Except, that is, until these past few years, when Israel destroyed the majority of the family’s vineyards and orchards, which were spread over 100 acres of land.
“Even my father doesn’t remember a time before [the vineyard], and he is 80 years old,” he says.
He estimates that the vines that Israel destroyed were “over a hundred years old – definitely over a hundred.”
‘Just taste the grapes’
Muhammad is lean and has short gray-and-black hair and pronounced cheekbones. In addition to being a farmer, he is an engineer and math teacher.
He meets with The Electronic Intifada at a school in Gaza City.
Before October 2023, Sheikh Ajlin was a popular tourist destination in Gaza. Farmers would line the roads with their stalls to sell grapes and figs.
On Fridays, families, including our own, would travel south on al-Rashid Street, along Gaza’s coast, and visit the stalls.
You would approach a stall and a vendor would tell you, “Just taste the grapes, and if you don’t like it, it’s on me.”
Sheikh Ajlin had the sea to its west, and then cafes, chalets and vineyards and farmland to the east. It felt very far removed from the city.
But Israel destroyed many of the structures and farms of Sheikh Ajlin – some farmers reported that their vineyards had been bulldozed – and the area is nearly unrecognizable from what it once was.
Israel even continues to attack the area after the so-called ceasefire. On 13 August, an Israeli strike targeted a vehicle traveling through Sheikh Ajlin, killing a police commander and injuring several others.
“We used to depend on ourselves and our source of livelihood [that we built] with our own hands, and today we live on aid,” he said.
Now, “there is nothing left.”
The area has “been taken over by crows and stray dogs.”
Gaza’s grape yield has shrunk by thousands of tons
Only 3 percent of cropland in Gaza, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, is “accessible and undamaged” as of June 2026.
This means that the majority of Gaza’s farms have been destroyed by Israeli attacks or rendered inaccessible due to the Israeli military occupation and its expanding “Yellow Line”.
Gaza’s grape producers have been deeply impacted by the Israeli war on Gaza, sustaining losses of over $6 million, according to Gaza’s agriculture ministry, as reported by Ma’an News Agency.
Before 2023, Gaza’s grape yield was around 8,000 tons. It is now just 500 tons.
Farmer Talaat Suleiman Shamalakh (52) said that Sheikh Ajlin grapes, in particular the Quraisha and Daboukhi varieties, were exported to the West Bank before October 2023.
Yet such exports have come to a halt.
Talaat said that the real crisis today is the lack of water available to revive crops, as well as the Israeli ban or restrictions on the entry of pesticides and gas. Furthermore, the high salinity of Gaza’s water has been an obstacle for farmers who must use that water to irrigate their crops.
Muhammad Shamalakh said that before 2023 the excessive extraction of groundwater from the area, in particular to sustain tourist chalets and swimming pools, led to higher salinity in the water.
“If the water is fresh, the trees thrive,” he said. “However, if you have saline water, it is better not to irrigate with it at all.”
Despite the immensity of these challenges, the cultural and agricultural heritage of Gaza’s grapes is being kept alive by the farmers who have returned to the land and who are attempting to replant grape varieties such as Daboukhi and Jarishi and Halwani.
Daboukhi is known for its golden colour, and Halwani for its sweetness. The Jarishi grape is special because it makes a sound when you eat it.
In June and July every year, farmer Muhammad Shamalakh said that they would carefully cut and remove the leaves surrounding the grapes to allow sunlight to get through. This is what gives some grapes their golden colour and allows them to ripen perfectly.
Muhammad said that harvest would begin at midnight, with a crew of seven young men from the family.
They would gather at 1 or 2 am, using flashlights to pick the grapes covered in dew. From there, the grapes would go to the various vendors along the coastal road or to trucks that would ship them up north.
Explosive soil
After a brief ceasefire came into effect in January 2025, the Shamalakh family farmers returned to their land after a long displacement in various parts of Gaza.
Many in Gaza will not forget those days, when thousands of people who had been forced out of their homes by Israeli attacks walked north along the coastal road.
The January 2025 ceasefire – which Israel frequently violated – did not last long.
Israel resumed its full-scale attacks in March last year. They continued until Donald Trump, the US president, announced that the war had ended in October – an announcement that has not actually halted Israel’s violence.
The Shamalakh family, unlike so many of Gaza’s farmers, are fortunate that their land has not been swallowed by the “Yellow Line” – which demarcates areas from which the Israeli occupation forbids Palestinians from accessing.
Still, there are risks in returning to the land and replanting, especially with the possibility of unexploded ordnance.
Sheikh Ajlin is no longer the agricultural or tourist hub it once was.
Missing are not only the cafes and shops, but also most of the roads, water pumps, farming supplies and access to any reliable source of electricity, according to Muhammad.
“As long as there are human beings in Sheikh Ajlin, life must return,” he said.
Sheikh Ajlin “sacrificed its sons, its land, its trees, its infrastructure and its buildings.”
Yet, Muhammad said, “provide us only with water and electricity, and I swear to God, in three years we will return Sheikh Ajlin’s grapes and figs to the way they were before and better.”
Already, Muhammad’s words are proving true.
Talaat was able to plant grape seedlings last year. They miraculously bore fruit.
Amro Rashad Abo Aisha is a student of English and writer in Gaza
Nour Abo Aisha is a journalist based in the Gaza Strip
