Gaza farmers battle to rebuild as WFP warns of West Bank settler violence

The UN is supporting farmers in Gaza who are struggling to rebuild their smallholdings in areas devastated by the Hamas-Israel war.

These growers include Taysir Dahdouh, whose farm in the Zeytun neighbourhood, east of Gaza City, is a little smaller than a football pitch. 

His land was once covered with greenhouses, but they’ve been destroyed or lost during the conflict that erupted on 7 October 2023. Today, he needs tools, seeds, fertilizer and water to grow the cucumbers and tomatoes he used to.

200 new homes

Alessandro Mrakic, Head of the Gaza Office for the UN Development Programme (UNDP), told UN News’s correspondent in the enclave that families who had once lived in one heavily bombed area had had to move multiple times before returning. 

“We have provided 200 relief housing units to provide shelter to the families who came back and started, as you see behind me, agriculture – started producing eggplants, tomatoes, molokhia, among others,” he said.

The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said on Thursday it has scaled up its cash assistance programme to help around 1,500 Palestinian farmers cultivate land across Gaza during the 2026 planting season, enough to produce fresh vegetables for more than 100,000 people.

Not enough space

But FAO warned that farmers “are squeezed into rapidly shrinking space” amid ongoing Israeli military activity, and it is calling for access to land, sea and production inputs including seeds, fertilizers, irrigation equipment and fishing gear.

Elsewhere, Deputy Special Coordinator for the peace process Ramiz Alakbarov welcomed new commitments worth almost $58 million from eight Member States to the UN Horizon Fund, and called on further partners to join the initiative. 

The World Food Programme (WFP) said people forced to move within Gaza risk losing access to basic services and called for safe access to reach those in need; despite the obstacles, it and its partners reached more than a quarter of a million people across 36 distribution sites in the first 12 days of this month.

Summer respite

Humanitarian partners also distributed more than 5,440 educational kits to support around 217,600 children during summer learning activities.

Turning to the West Bank, a high-level delegation led by aid coordination office OCHA visited Deir Nidham village in the Ramallah governorate on Wednesday, meeting Palestinian families affected by settler violence and the expansion of settlement outposts. 

Settler attacks accounted for around 55 per cent of all Palestinian injuries in the West Bank so far during 2026.

Guterres voices alarm

UN Spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric said the Secretary-General is “deeply alarmed” that Israeli authorities have granted city status to Givat Ze’ev, a settlement northwest of Jerusalem, adding that the designation “does not alter the city’s legal status under international law as part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory.”

All Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, are illegal under international law, Mr. Dujarric reiterated, recalling the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion of July 2024. 

He said settlements remain a major obstacle to a two-State solution, and renewed the Secretary-General’s call on Israel to halt all settlement expansion.