By Aya Elsehaimy
Yousef Abu Rabee planting seeds in front of the ruins of his home in Beit Lahiya, Gaza, March 31, 2024, Yousef Abu Rabee’s Facebook page.
Yousef Abu Rabee was an alumnus of Al-Azhar University and a student of Professor Ahmed Abu Shaban at the King Hassan II Faculty of Agriculture and Veterinary Sciences. He was born in Beit Lahiya, a neighborhood at the northern tip of the Gaza Strip famous for its strawberry fields and fertile land. He came from a family of farmers who have known, planted, and cultivated the land for generations. Passionate about agriculture and continuing his family’s legacy, Abu Rabee found himself in search of answers during his studies to find innovative ways to farm under harsh conditions of land restriction and water scarcity imposed by the two-decade-long Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip. He pursued his bachelor’s degree in Agricultural Engineering with a specialization in Agronomy (field crop production and soil management). He was passionate about farming and agriculture not only as a means of survival, but also as a way to empower dignity and self-sufficiency within his community. In his own words in an interview with the Ramallah-based Ma‘an Center for Development, Abu Rabee described farming as “not just an idea, but an instinct” inside him and all the farmers in the region. Learning and teaching sustainable farming was a mission and a calling, especially as the Israeli-imposed Buffer Zone encroached on arable land in the Gaza strip, rendering 35% of it unsafe for Palestinians to farm (including much of Beit Lahiya), and destroying close to 46% of the already limited arable land as early as 2008-2009 during Operation Cast Lead and further during repeated military assaults.
Despite the challenges, Abu Rabee put his ancestral and academic knowledge to use in Beit Lahiya. Together with his community, he managed to expand their strawberry crops to 4,500 dunams (4.5 km²) in 2023, his family’s largest since 1967. The war deprived them of reaping the fruits of their labor at the end of the year. In October 2023, Abu Rabee was only two months away from harvesting his strawberry crops and one semester away from graduating with his Bachelor of Science degree. Immediately after October 7th, the residents of Beit Lahiya fell under indiscriminate Israeli bombardment reminiscent of previous attacks they had experienced under siege and occupation, but with the scale growing to unprecedented and catastrophic heights as the days went on. They were forced to flee their homes and their farmlands within 24 hours as the bombing intensified. Abu Rabee and his family evacuated to the Jabalia Refugee Camp after an F-16 warplane bombed the house next door and killed their neighbors. It would not be the last of their displacements, as they had to evacuate again in November, walking for hours on foot with nowhere to go. “With every displacement,” he told Al-Mayadeen, “we lost more of our basic needs and our humanity.”
Between the displacement under constant bombardment and Israel’s systematic starvation campaign, Abu Rabee went from growing his own food and helping feed his community to resorting to eating grass and animal feed to survive. In the same interview, he stated that he watched three of his neighbors die of hunger and he felt that his family was about to meet the same fate. In one Instagram post, he described the meals airdropped in aid packages in Northern Gaza as “Not big enough for an individual,” and lamented the manufactured hunger that had driven his people to such conditions. He deserved better, and his community deserved better. Abu Rabee felt compelled to put his skills in agronomy to immediate work.
In January 2024, the Israeli Occupation Forces permitted residents of Beit Lahiya to return, and Abu Rabee did not waste a moment to return home. He found his once green neighborhood a shell of what it had been – his family’s home bombed and their farm crops destroyed and withered away. Despite the scale of the destruction, however, the land still had goodness and care to offer. His first instinct was to salvage the loss, to preserve, to recreate, and to heal his community through healing the land.
Abu Rabee started harvesting seeds from the parched remains of fruits and vegetables in the devastated farmlands. He incubated his first project on the rooftop of what remained of his home. The idea was to grow the seeds into seedlings that the residents of Beit Lahiya could regrow into plants and achieve food security. He had a group of supportive friends and peers whose vision for Beit Lahiya transcended the destruction that surrounded them everywhere. However, the bombardments soon resumed, and he lost more of his friends to the senseless killing.
By March of the same year and as soon as a ceasefire went into effect, Abu Rabee announced the حنزرعها Hanezraaha (We Will Plant It) Initiative. He wanted to implement his idea on a larger scale and inspire people in other parts of Gaza to do the same. In one Instagram post, he shared that the ceasefire did not mean that the starvation campaign had ended, but that the restriction of the already-rationed aid (when even that was permitted) was killing people at a slower rate. By June of 2024, and with the help of his community and friends, he had amassed tens of thousands of seedlings to share. They were growing eggplant, pepper, zucchini, basil, and mulukhiya (a variety of jute plant) native to the land. Abu Rabee’s idea of seed sovereignty gained traction and support from his community and others in the West Bank.
In September 2024, Abu Rabee posted a video sharing his heartbreak that the Israeli Occupation forces bulldozed large swaths of farmland that he and his peers had started to recultivate. He shared the before and after images with a caption that said, “Thank God for everything. May God re-compensate us. We will come back stronger than before. [We ask for] your prayers.” He went straight to work again, saving seeds, planting, and recultivating. His people were facing a manufactured famine, and he had no time to waste.
In early October 2024, Abu Rabee gave an interview to Al-Jazeera’s Bisan Owda. He spoke about the challenges he faced as a farmer trying to survive and feed his community while teaching them what he learned. He shared his hopes and dreams that the war machine would turn off its gears, so he could continue doing what his family had done for generations, growing the land. Abu Rabee knew that empowering his people to survive colonial violence was one of the most threatening acts of defiance to their occupier. In his own words, “I don’t expect to live long because I do what drives the occupier crazy the most.” Two weeks later, on October 21st, 2024, Israel killed Yousef Abu Rabee in a targeted airstrike after he miraculously survived another attack earlier that month. He was only 24 years old.
Abu Rabee was loved and mourned by many in Gaza and all over the world. Bisan Owda shared in anguish, “This man represents people, and families, and markets, and many things that need to go on.” The Gaza Kitchen author Laila El-Haddad shared a tweet mourning her friend and describing him as “A true hero, resisting genocide in impossible circumstances.” And his professor and mentor, Professor Ahmed Abu Shaban, said of him, “Yousef Abu Rabee was a threat more than all fighters. I believe that this resilience model is more effective than any other model.”
Abu Rabee’s murder was not only the unjust killing of a single individual, but an integral component of the campaign of scholasticide that targets knowledge, educators, and students. It is a campaign based in the colonial understanding that subjugated peoples empower themselves through knowledge. Even something as seemingly mundane as the ability to create a sustainable food system can become a threat to colonial domination.
Yet his example lives on, and his initiative continues to inspire. We honor him and his legacy, and call for a halt to the Israeli war machine and a complete end to the blockade on Gaza so that Palestinians can see the green, revived Gaza that Yousef Abu Rabee worked so hard to achieve.