On 31 July 2025, Israeli forces demolished the Seed Multiplication Unit of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) in Hebron—a facility essential for preserving indigenous Palestinian seed varieties (Quds News Network, 2025; Yale Environment 360, 2025). Bulldozers and heavy machinery were deployed to destroy climate-control rooms, irrigation systems, technical monitoring equipment, electricity infrastructure, and water supply networks (Quds News Network, 2025; Yale Environment 360, 2025).
The facility, operational since 2003, housed more than 70 local seed varieties—tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplants, zucchini—adapted to West Bank and Gaza conditions (Yale Environment 360, 2025; Quds News Network, 2025). The UAWC described the act as a “grave escalation” and “an act of erasure, intended to sever the generational ties between farmers and their land” (Yale Environment 360, 2025; Al Mayadeen English, 2025).
International media likewise characterised the destruction as an assault on Palestinian food sovereignty and a cultural heritage initiative. Yale Environment 360 cited parallels in conflict zones such as Ukraine and Sudan, where seed banks have also been targeted; it noted that UAWC had previously safeguarded some seed samples in Svalbard’s Global Seed Vault as a precaution (Yale Environment 360, 2025). Al Mayadeen highlighted the demolition as a “strategic attack on the foundations of Palestinian resilience” (Al Mayadeen English, 2025).
Seed banks are not neutral repositories: they carry the DNA of memory and of resistance. Vivien Sansour’s book, based in the diaspora, intentionally framed seed saving as political resistance — a means to preserve not just biodiversity but heritage in the face of erasure. She described seeds as a “map to say: Look, this is who we are, this is who we were, and this is who we’ve been.”
The targeting of seed systems is part of a broader strategy of cultural genocide, ecocide and epistimicide — erasing not just people but modes of knowing, growing, and being. UN and nonprofit investigators have characterized damage to archives, mosques, universities, and farmland in Gaza as acts of systematic cultural destruction and a crime of extermination, and part of an ongoing genocide that has been found plaucible by the ICJ.
The destruction of food sovereignty has precedent in colonial and genocidal contexts: In the US colonial expansion, Native American agricultural systems and buffalo populations were systematically destroyed to force dependence and starvation. (Viacampesina)
Feature photo source: The New Yorker
Also read: Palestine: At least 20 dead, Israeli forces advance in Khan Younis
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