This summer, Israeli bulldozers rolled through the West Bank city of Hebron with ruthless efficiency, targeting not soldiers or weapons caches, but something deeply vulnerable: Palestine’s only surviving national seed bank.
Within hours of the bulldozers’ arrival on July 31, 2025, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees’ seed multiplication facility lay in ruins — its propagation materials scattered, its infrastructure demolished, and with it, generations of Palestinian agricultural heritage reduced to rubble.
What happened in Hebron fits the legal definition of ecocide — the deliberate destruction of ecosystems to undermine human survival.
The Union of Agricultural Work Committees condemned this attack as “an act of erasure intended to sever the generational ties between farmers and their land.”
When ecocide operates within the context of genocide, as it does in Palestine, it functions as a temporal weapon that extends the logic of elimination far beyond the present moment, reaching into an indefinite future where recovery becomes systematically impossible.
The Union of Agricultural Work Committees’ seed facility housed over 70 baladi (heirloom) seed varieties, many of which no longer exist elsewhere, that Palestinian farmers had cultivated and perfected over centuries. These seeds — for rare, indigenous, hardy strains of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini, and others collected from local farms in the West Bank and Gaza — weren’t just any seeds. They were living libraries of Palestinian agricultural knowledge, carrying genetic traits for drought resistance, soil adaptation, and nutritional density that commercial varieties lack.
Their destruction was no accident. It was strategic.
Read the full article by Ilā Ravichandran on Truthout.org