The second year of the Netanyahu-Smotrich-Ben Gvir government is the year in which the government’s annexation plan began to be implemented in practice, as stipulated in the coalition agreement at the end of 2022. As a reminder, in 2023, the Settlement Administration was established within the Ministry of Defense, headed by Minister Smotrich. The administration was created as part of the implementation of the coalition agreements between Likud and Religious Zionism. At the same time, the appointment of Itamar Ben Gvir as Minister responsible for the police led to a significant reduction in law enforcement on settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank.
Update on humanitarian assistance to Gaza
Statement by the Humanitarian Coordinator, Mr. Muhannad Hadi, on the halt to the entry of humanitarian supplies into Gaza
10 March 2025
The entry of humanitarian assistance into Gaza has been halted for nine consecutive days
Humanitarian aid in Gaza is a lifeline for over two million Palestinians who have endured unimaginable conditions for many months. A sustained supply of aid is indispensable to their survival.
International humanitarian law is clear: civilians' essential needs must be met, including through the unimpeded entry and distribution of humanitarian assistance.
The entry of lifesaving aid must resume immediately. Any further delays will further reverse any progress we have managed to achieve during the ceasefire.
The ceasefire must hold. The parties must fulfill their obligations under international law. Hostages must be released. Humanitarian assistance must be allowed in.
Israel’s War Decimated Gaza’s Farmlands and Killed Most of its Livestock
GAZA—On an afternoon in early February, Sami Abu Amr, a 61-year-old farmer, walked through his roughly three-acre stretch of land that lies east of the Gaza City neighborhood of Shuja’iyya where he once tended olive trees and grew seasonal vegetables, including cucumbers, tomatoes, and potatoes. Before the war, the sale of his produce to local residents provided the sole source of income for his family of 13, including his sons and grandchildren. But these agricultural lands are now a scene of devastation: A barren landscape of uprooted trees, bulldozer tracks and soil riddled with craters left by Israeli airstrikes.
Along with the ruin of his farmland, the Israeli military had also destroyed Abu Amr’s agricultural equipment, greenhouse, irrigation network, and poultry farm, amounting to losses he estimates at $70,000. "This land is not just a source of livelihood,” Abu Amr said. “It is my life, my history. I have nurtured it with my sweat for years.”
Before Israel’s assault began in 2023, agricultural land covered approximately 47% of the Gaza Strip and produced enough food to serve up to a third of local demand, offering a critical source of food for Palestinians living under siege for nearly two decades.
Following the “ceasefire” that went into effect January 19, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza returned to their homes and land after months of forced displacement only to find an apocalyptic landscape. In addition to the destruction of homes, shops, bakeries, hospitals, universities, roads, and other civilian infrastructure, Israel’s decimated almost all of Gaza’s agricultural capacity.
According to the UN, 82% of croplands, 55% of on-farm irrigation systems and 78% of greenhouses have been damaged, leaving once-productive fields barren. Nearly 70% of agricultural wells have been damaged while 96% of cattle and 99% of poultry have died.
The first phase of the “ceasefire,” which went into effect on January 19, allowed for a surge of aid into Gaza, providing some degree of reprieve to the humanitarian catastrophe. However, Israel violated the agreement by heavily restricting the number of trucks carrying fuel—critical for powering generators and equipment—as well as live animals and animal feed. On March 2, as the first phase of the ceasefire ended, Israel announced it was reimposing a total blockade on Gaza—barring any trucks from entering—as it had done in the opening weeks of its military campaign in October 2023. According to the signed ceasefire agreement, discussions about the implementation of the second phase of the deal were slated to commence on February 3, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu refused to send a negotiating team and swiftly returned to his agenda of sabotage.
Food prices in Gaza doubled or tripled within a day of phase one’s end, as Israel once again wielded forced hunger and starvation as a weapon of war, tactics that led to the issuance of arrest warrants by the International Criminal Court for Netanyahu and his former defense minister Yoav Gallant. Farmers who have returned to their lands have to contend with the destruction of their equipment, greenhouses and agricultural soil, as well as the scarcity of desalinated water. Israel has also imposed heavy restrictions on the entry of seeds, fertilizers and other items needed for farming.
Abu Amr is now starting from scratch. Accessing water is no easy feat—over the course of the war, the Israeli military targeted essential infrastructure, including water wells that had sustained agriculture in the area. "It's as if they wanted to kill the land before they killed us," Abu Amr said.
Hosni Mehanna, a spokesperson for the Gaza Municipality, told Drop Site that 203 out of 319 water wells in Gaza—more than 65 percent—have suffered severe damage, rendering them unusable. He added that the main challenge now is the absence of equipment and machinery to repair wells and damaged water networks.
Per capita water supply in Gaza has dropped to around three liters per day, Mehanna said. The World Health Organization maintains that 20 liters per capita per day is the minimum quantity of safe water required to meet essential levels of health and hygiene.
With no water supply and no working irrigation pipes, Abu Amr explored digging a private well, but the cost was steep—$8,000, a sum he did not have.
In mid-February, when he told his wife about his dilemma, she handed him gold jewelry she had inherited from her mother. "Take my gold and plant the land,” she told him. “We don’t need gold if we have no land.”
He had no choice but to take the risk, selling the gold and hiring an excavator to drill the well, even as he feared the money might run out before they hit groundwater. "Those were heavy moments,” he said. “I feared the depth wouldn't be enough, or that the water would be scarce. But I kept telling myself: the land never fails its people."
After days of work, water finally burst from the ground—a sign of hope. Abu Amr then collected his hoses, which were damaged during the war and riddled with holes, and asked a local workshop to repair them.
He now faced his next challenge: There were no seeds available due to Israel’s heavy restrictions on seed kits into Gaza for the past 17 months. Searching through what remained of his old stock, Abu Amr found a handful of cucumber and pepper seeds. He began planting them in plastic bags filled with soil, and irrigating them with the little water he could draw from the well until the seedlings were ready for planting. "They may have stolen everything from us, but they will not steal our will,” he said. “This land will be green again, even if I pay for it with my heart's blood."
An analysis by Forensic Architecture last year found that by March 2024, approximately 40 percent of the land in Gaza previously used for food production has been destroyed. Since then, farmers say the devastation has become even more catastrophic. (Credit: Forensic Architecture)
As farmers begin their efforts to resume cultivation of their land, there are mounting fears that Israel’s relentless bombing campaign and ground invasion may have permanently damaged much of the soil in Gaza and rendered it infertile.
On the outskirts of Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip, Farid al-Attar, a 52-year-old farmer, stood in the middle of his land, gazing in sorrow at the tomato and corn seedlings he planted weeks ago, now drooped and withering. The soil, he fears, is ruined.
Al-Attar knelt down and touched the yellow leaves of his corn seedlings. "This has never happened to me before. I have been farming here for twenty years, and this soil has always given me good crops. But now, it's as if the land is sick. It doesn't respond to farming," he observed. “I feel that the land is not the same anymore. Even the water we irrigate the crops with has changed, maybe toxic substances have seeped into it?”
Al-Attar’s theory is likely correct. Last November, the Environmental Quality Authority—an independent agency established by the Palestinian Authority in the 1990s—published a report concluding that Israel’s dropping of more than 85,000 tons of munitions on Gaza has led to "pollution of the soil with toxic chemicals that will make agriculture difficult for decades to come." The report also pointed out that Israel used various types of weapons, including white phosphorus, that can cause permanent environmental damage.
Al-Attar fears that this is the beginning of the death of the agricultural sector in Gaza. Israel’s ongoing restrictions on the entry of fertilizers and agricultural equipment, combined with a lack of clean water for irrigation, has stripped farmers of any options to try to salvage their land.
"We are not asking for the impossible, just let us plant and live,” he said. “Agriculture in Gaza is not just a profession, it is our life. If no one moves to save it, we will lose our only source of food."
Rasha Abou Jalal is an independent reporter based in Deir Al Balah, Gaza and we have been honored to publish her reporting at Drop Site News. Her report today details the perilous situation facing farmers and the agricultural sector in Gaza. Israel’s 16 months of massive bombardment and occupation, combined with an ongoing Israeli blockade on equipment, the import of seeds and livestock, and a water shortage, has largely destroyed an industry that once provided food for nearly a third of the population.
We are able to bring you this story, as well as regular, on-the-ground reports from inside Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, and elsewhere because of the support of our paid subscribers. We have a commitment to ensuring that our journalism is not locked behind a paywall. But the only way we can sustain this is through the voluntary support of our community of readers. If you are a free subscriber and you support our work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription or gifting one to a friend or family member. You can also make a 501(c)(3) tax-deductible donation to support our work. If you do not have the means to support our work financially, you can do your part by sharing our work on social media and by forwarding this email to your network of contacts.
I am Rasha Abu Jalal, a journalist from the Gaza Strip. I work in several media outlets covering Palestinian political, humanitarian and social issues. I am a permanent member of the judging committee for the annual Press House Award.
Punitive tax on donations will silence Israel’s conscience, say critics
Israeli not-for-profits including Physicians for Human Rights and Peace Now say if the new tax law passes, they will lose the foreign income that enables them to operate.
For Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition, a new tax regime that could undermine the viability of left-leaning civil society organisations is about rooting out illegitimate foreign influence. Critics say it is about silencing dissent.
But for Tal Applebaum, a volunteer physician at Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I), which runs a clinic for asylum seekers in Jaffa, the essence of the NGO is helping the weakest and most vulnerable people in Israel.
The small clinic, marked with a modest sign in four languages on a quiet residential street, treats about a thousand patients a year, many of whom come back multiple times. The patients, adults who have fled Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and other lands, are denied medical care by the Israeli state because of their limbo-like status.
Applebaum and PHR-I fill the void left by the government. “Society must take care of the weak,” she says. “This is the least one can do if he has the time, it’s basic,” she adds, in reference to her own efforts.
Applebaum, a retired Tel Aviv family doctor interviewed during a break, works in a cramped examination room, a stethoscope and blood pressure cuff at the ready on her desk. What the room lacks in space, she makes up for in empathy.
“Life is tough for those who aren’t privileged,” she explains. “I’m privileged and I feel I have to share what I have.”
Although this approach is consistent with the highest values of Judaism, the Netanyahu coalition apparently doesn’t embrace it. PHR-I’s clinic is now threatened as a result of legislation introduced by Ariel Kellner of Likud that passed preliminary reading two weeks ago.
If the bill becomes law, it will shut us down.
Hagit Ofran, Peace Now
The new law would impose an 80% tax on foreign government funding for civil society organisations, and would bar organisations that receive the majority of their funds through foreign state entities from petitioning Israeli courts.
In practice, that would make it impossible for PHR-I and similar non-profits to continue receiving the foreign funding that sustains them or to be active in the Israeli court system where they fight government and army actions they see as abusive and illegal.
Among the other groups threatened are Peace Now, Ir Amim, which focuses on East Jerusalem, Gisha, which presses against the odds for meeting the humanitarian needs of Gaza’s population, B’tselem, the largest Israeli human rights organization combatting the occupation and what it views as apartheid, HaMoked, which fights in the courts against alleged violations of the rights of Palestinians, and Bimkom, which focuses on planning rights, to name a few.
Taken together, such groups are seen by their supporters as the collective conscience of Israel and a last bastion of humanism in a country where Jewish supremacism has gained considerable traction.
Although Applebaum is aided by a translator, cultural and linguistic gaps sometimes give her the feeling that she is unable to help cure as much as she would like. “I see a lot of diseases. But the most difficult part to understand is what is not said during the visit, the problem that makes the patient come again and again.
“There is a cultural difference with Ethiopian patients. If they say they have pain somewhere, they can mean something else. They may think that they have a demon in their abdomen and that I can take it out.”
The explanatory notes to Kellner’s bill essentially cast the NGOs as foreign agents meddling in Israeli affairs. The NGOs counter that issues they address such as the occupation are by definition international and that the donor countries are European democracies.
The bill, which imposes an 80% tax on NGOs that receive foreign government funding, would not apply to NGOs that also receive funding from the Israeli government or to those granted exemptions by the finance minister. In practice this means that right-wing organisations would not be touched.
“The purpose of this bill is to reduce the indirect influence of foreign governments and political entities on the state of Israel,” says the explanatory notes to the bill.
The foreign agent argument was also used by Putin to eliminate NGOs that differed with the regime’s views in Russia.
The foreign agent argument was also used by Vladmir Putin to eliminate NGOs that differed with the regime’s views in Russia.
Critics of the legislation see it as an integral part of a drive to silence freedom of expression, debate and critical voices while engineering a shift to an autocratic system of government. Most of the groups have advocacy arms that have taken on added importance in recent years with the decline and even disappearance of left-wing parties in the Knesset. If not for the field research of the left-wing NGOs, many dark deeds would be unmonitored and unreported.
For example, last week, PHR-I published a report on detention and alleged torture on a wide scale of Gaza doctors and medical personnel. The IDF says its soldiers uphold international law.
PHR-I is simultaneously taking court action to overturn a government halting of medical care previously accorded to children of asylum seekers. It says the cutback violates Israel’s commitments under the UN Convention on Rights of the Child.
In East Jerusalem, Peace Now and Ir Amim are helping Palestinians in the neighbourhood of Silwan combat being evicted as part of the far-right Ateret Cohanim organisation’s drive to expand the Jewish presence in the area.
Although some of the low-income Palestinian families trace their own presence back more than 60 years, discriminatory Israeli laws effectively allow settlers to “reclaim” property in East Jerusalem that was in Jewish hands before 1948 while preventing Palestinians from doing the same in West Jerusalem.
This has led to a series of cruel, court-endorsed evictions, with residents bracing for a likely decision this week that could dispossess two more families, the Odehs and the Shuweikis. All told, 18 homes housing a total of about 700 people are in danger, according to Zuheir Rajabi, a community leader who is himself facing eviction proceedings.
“Peace Now helps us a lot,” Rajabi says. “They stand by us legally and bring people on visits to see what is happening here. They are with us on cases from start to finish. On a psychological level, they always give us the feeling they are with us.”
I don’t want the German government deciding which Jews should live in an old synagogue in the heart of Jerusalem.
Daniel Luria, executive director of Ateret Cohanim
“If they stop the Israelis who help us defend our homes, it’s a big problem,” Rajabi says. “It will make things much harder for us and increase the danger.”
But Ateret Cohanim executive director Daniel Luria says stopping the work of Peace Now, Ir Amim and other foreign government-funded NGOs is a step that is long overdue. “How can any Israeli government allow the funding of all these anti-Israel, anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist activities?” he asked. “I don’t want the German government deciding which Jews should live or not live in an old synagogue in the heart of Jerusalem.”
Hagit Ofran, director of Peace Now’s settlement monitoring unit, says that if the bill becomes law “it will shut us down”.
“We won’t be able to get donations from the countries that support us. No donor will give to us when there is 80% tax. This will shut down all the organisations that the state doesn’t like.” Other NGO staffers stressed that any tax would stop the funding because the foreign government donations are conditional on being tax exempt.
In the PHR-I clinic, Applebaum is defiant when asked about the legislation. Even if the clinic is harmed, it will keep going in some form, she vows. “We will still be here even if we don’t have medicine to give. The most important thing is caring, the fact that someone can speak about what he suffers from. Even if what we can do is very small, we’ll still be here.”
Ben Lynfield covered Israeli and Palestinian politics for The Independent and served as Middle Eastern affairs correspondent at the Jerusalem Post. He writes for publications in the region and has contributed to the Christian Science Monitor, Foreign Policy and the New Statesman.
Tal applebaum, a doctor at a clinic for refugees in Jaffa run by Physicians for Human Rights Israel (supplied)