ALUMIM, Gaza envelope — Where the potato fields of Kibbutz Alumim meet those of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, one of Alumim’s salaried farmers, Elyada Yovel, from a West Bank settlement southwest of Hebron, opens his arms wide to hug two Bedouin laborers he hasn’t seen for some time.
“Ahlan!” he cries out in Arabic. The two, from the Bedouin town of Rahat, grin and respond in kind.
It’s sowing time for some potato varieties, and Yovel plunges his hands into the sandy ridges to check the depth at which the spuds have been planted.
“Yup, right depth,” he says, as a tractor approaches with another load to insert into the soil.
We have driven out to the Gaza border, past the single wall that remains of the workers’ residential area, burned-out chicken sheds, vandalized hothouses, and charred piles of irrigation equipment that were byproducts of Hamas’s murderous onslaught on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.
Today, standing in the fields, which reach right up to the Gaza border, you can see piles of rubble on the periphery of Gaza City inside the Strip. The blur of the Mediterranean Sea is just beyond.
The rubble is located within a security belt that the IDF has cleared on the Gazan side of the border to improve visibility with an eye toward ensuring that a Hamas invasion like the one that killed 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage a year ago can never happen again.
We stop at another potato field and Yovel recalls, “On October 6, I stood in this field and saw the potato buds pushing through. Because of the war [sparked by Hamas’s October 7 attack], I couldn’t reach them again. There was a dry winter, and everything died.”
Until October 7, Kibbutz Alumim, less than 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) from the Gaza border, was home to 41 foreign workers, 24 from Thailand and 17 agriculture students from Nepal.
Hamas gunmen who rampaged throughout the Gaza border area massacred 12 Thais on Alumim, injured one, and abducted four. Ten of the Nepali students were gunned down, four were wounded, and one was kidnapped and remains in captivity. The survivors flew home.
Unlike other communities that were destroyed during the Hamas onslaught, the rest of Alumim, whose security team battled the terrorists for hours, remained intact.
A lost year
Field crops, orchards, greenhouses, and livestock farming provide Alumim’s primary income.
Displaced residents returned from temporary accommodation in central coastal Netanya in late August, in time for the new school year.
The IDF initially barred farmers from the fields for security reasons. After a limited hostage exchange in November, the army agreed to permit restricted access, which has been gradually loosened. According to Amir Dagan, CEO of Alumim Agriculture, timetables must still be coordinated with the military in advance.
“Our wheat was badly harmed,” he tells The Times of Israel. “It wasn’t sowed in time and didn’t get the necessary treatment. Some of the carrots, sweet potatoes, cabbages, and other crops couldn’t be harvested. We had huge greenhouses for peppers, but everything was destroyed. We were once the biggest suppliers of sweet mini-peppers. Today, we have a very small field.”
Dagan estimates that the direct damage to equipment and crops burned, vandalized, or abandoned ran into tens of millions of shekels.
A year on, he is still holding “very long discussions” with the government’s property compensation agency. The officials there want to help, he says, but are severely restricted by what the law allows. For example, compensation for equipment will be based on its used value.
“We’ve spent over NIS 4 million (over $1 million) on drip irrigation and sprinklers because we couldn’t wait,” Dagan says.
Dagan continues, “We’ve made many decisions that didn’t necessarily make economic sense. It was important to plant lots of things to get things going again. People here are very connected to agriculture. It’s part of their resilience. When you stop, it’s hard to start again. But this year, my decisions must be based on business, not morale or ideology. We believed the state would help us. Maybe it still will.”
Some Thai laborers are returning, but as the citrus harvesting season approaches, Dagan doesn’t know how to find enough seasonal labor to ensure everything is picked.
Other issues from before the war now loom larger, says Dagan. He wonders what will happen to government plans — currently on hold — to import more fruit and vegetables, ostensibly to bring prices down. Will policymakers decide, in the wake of the war, to strengthen Israeli agriculture to ensure food independence and security instead?
“I don’t believe anybody’s promises,” says Dagan. “We’ve been through this [attacks from Gaza] for 20 years. Each time, they promise. They plan things, and nothing happens. I’m responsible. We deal with the here and now. They’ve said they’ll lower water prices and favor agriculture for years, but it doesn’t happen.”
Asked about the future, potato farmer Elyada Yovel says, “I want to believe that our generation won’t allow October 7 to happen again. We were asleep and I want to believe we’ve woken up.”
