A Gaza farmer's return to his ancestral vineyards

Gaza City, Gaza Strip - It's 4am, and Gaza is still dark and quiet. But Khaled Abu Madeen has a routine, one that he has recently picked up again after being forced to abandon it over nearly three years of war.

He walks between the rows of grapevines in Sheikh Ijlin, in the southwestern corner of Gaza City, alongside his workers, checking the fruit and cutting bunches from the vines that have survived Israel's genocidal war.

The early morning air is cooler. The first light begins to spread across the vineyard, revealing rows of green that, for a time, Khaled feared he might never see again.

For Khaled, who is 50, this year is more than a harvest. It is the return of a life he thought he had lost.

“I feel like I have returned to my soul,” he says, as he works among the vines.

His family has cultivated grapes and figs in Sheikh Ijlin for generations. The land was inherited from his father and grandfather, and Khaled eventually made farming his full-time profession, leaving behind a career in project management.

Then, in October 2023, the war began. Khaled had the opportunity to leave. His wife is Lebanese-Italian, and Khaled himself had previously studied in Italy, earning an undergraduate and a postgraduate degree.

Moving to safety in Italy made sense. But that would mean abandoning his vineyards, and Khaled couldn't do it.

For the first few months of the war, Khaled stayed in Gaza City, refusing to leave despite the danger.

His wife and children were eventually evacuated to Italy. Khaled stayed behind, trying to remain close to the land and his elderly mother.

Then the Israeli strikes moved closer. He says he received a call ordering him to leave immediately, with a threat that the house would be bombed if he did not.

"I had no choice," Khaled recounts. "I left with my mother and fled to Deir el-Balah, in central Gaza."

Away from his vineyards, Khaled says, his thoughts remained fixed on what was happening to his land.

Despite the great danger - northern Gaza, including Gaza City, has been devastated by Israeli forces in the war - he tried more than once to get back.

During one attempt, he went with two workers to check the fields. Israeli forces opened fire, he says, injuring one of the workers.

“We ran away from the shooting,” Khaled recalls. “We stayed for hours until we were able to rescue him after he had lost a lot of blood.”

And yet, despite that experience, Khaled couldn't get the thought out of his head: He had to return to his vines.

Gaza has been destroyed by Israel's war. More than 73,000 Palestinians have been killed, and most of the population remains displaced.

Reconstruction in the Strip remains frozen, with Israel refusing to allow rebuilding to begin.

And yet, an October ceasefire deal allowed for Palestinians to slowly return to their land - including Khaled.

What he found shocked him.

About 60 percent of his vines had been uprooted, including old trees that had stood for decades.

The land he had known had become almost unrecognisable. So Khaled got to work.

Bulldozers and workers were brought in to remove piles of sand and level the ground. He began restoring the fields and tending to the vines that had survived.

It's an expensive job, and it's not yet complete. Khaled estimates that restoring the vineyard to its former condition will require at least $40,000.

And he is attempting to do it while agricultural supplies remain difficult to obtain, including pesticides and other materials needed to protect the crops, as a result of Israeli restrictions on the entry of goods into Gaza.

And yet, Khaled has had some success.

As spring arrived, new shoots began emerging from old roots. The vines were coming back.

“It was very touching seeing the grapevines growing again,” Khaled says, smiling. “There were mixed feelings of joy and hope after long suffering.”

This year, he estimates that his harvest has reached about 40 percent of what he would have produced before the war.

By normal agricultural standards, it is a poor harvest, but for Khaled, it is a huge triumph.

After nearly three years in which much of the land was destroyed and much of his life was interrupted, the sight of bunches of grapes has brought hope back.