BREAD, WATER, SEED: FOOD AS WEAPON, FOOD AS RESISTANCE IN GAZA

Reading Al Mezan Report; ‘My children have nothing to eat,’ Oct 17, 2026, with Vandana Shiva and Palestinian Feminist Scholars. “While we were being displaced through the Netzarim Corridor, Israeli occupation soldiers took my husband. Since then… we depend primarily on humanitarian assistance and charitable food kitchens, which we can barely access… There are days when we suffer from hunger and my children have nothing to eat.” S.D., mother of two, displaced from Beit Lahia to Nusseirat, quoted by Al Mezan, takayas. Food is scarcity today in Gaza and the most politicised weapon as well.

S.D.’s testimony condenses what Al Mezan documents as systematic: 87% agricultural land and natural habitat destroyed, 8,700 agricultural wells demolished, 9,992 cattle, sheep, poultry farms ruined, 69,000 livestock killed, 90% industrial establishments devastated, 35,000 jobs lost, 201,290 buildings damaged, 128 aid convoys, 64 distribution centres, 48 takayas targeted, 2,605 aid seekers and aid workers killed, 67% of Strip occupied east of yellow line, 466 malnutrition or starvation deaths including 156 children, 158,001 acute malnutrition cases under-five 2024 to Aug 2026 including 28,716 severe, 74,200 children projected to need treatment by April 2027, 1.4 million facing crisis-level food insecurity, 61% anemia in pregnant women, 4,000 pregnancy losses first half of 2026, 11% elderly go whole day without eating. This is not collateral damage, this is what Vandana Shiva calls Food Fascism and what Palestinian feminists call unchilding through starvation. This is chaos, this is brutality and it is ravaging of life and victimization beyond comprehension, this article reads Gaza through three lenses: Shiva’s ecofeminism, Palestinian feminist agrarian scholarship and liberation theology of bread and water, with ecocide as a bridge.

VANDANA SHIVA: FROM FOOD FASCISM TO EARTH DEMOCRACY

Vandana Shiva, Indian physicist, ecofeminist, Navdanya founder, provides the first frame. Four concepts are directly applicable: Food as Weapon vs Food as Freedom, Stolen Harvest, 2000, where Shiva argues industrial agriculture’s notion of stealing harvest by destroying small farmer’s capacity to produce and then selling it back as commodity. Gaza literalizes this: destroy 87% farmland, poultry sector, fishing, aquaculture, Al Mezan, together constitutes destruction of the capacity to produce protein. Then population depends on 48 takayas for lunch as the only meal. Meat and dairy production are ceased, not by market but by bombing and barricading the resources. Shiva would understand this as when food is a weapon, hunger is not scarcity but engineered. Monocultures of Mind, 1993 and Seed Satyagraha where Shiva argues Green Revolution replaces biodiversity with monoculture, making the system vulnerable. Gaza’s pre-war agriculture was already restricted, the diverse baladi wheat, heirloom vegetables, olive, citrus and strawberries have been kept away. Destruction of the greenhouses and bulldozing of the crops, monoculture of aid and flour, rice, lentils from trucks. 8,700 wells destroyed, death of groundwater irrigation that sustained diversity, Shiva understands this as Seed Apartheid, controlling who can sow and who can own. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Development, 1988 Ecofeminism where Shiva shows women are first food providers, first affected when food system collapses. Mothers grind animal feed to make bread, drink contaminated water, and go without for consecutive days so children survive, 48% elderly reduce portions for family, 61% anemia pregnant women. This is ecofeminist point: women absorb famine in bodies, anemia, high-risk pregnancy, 1 in 3 high-risk, and pregnancy losses tripled. Shiva: The violence to nature is violence to women who depend on nature for food. Earth Democracy, 2005, Obligation to Seed, Water and Soil: Shiva contrasts corporate property vs community commons. Water is commons, not commodity, Destroying 8,700 wells and preventing fishing are nothing but enclosure of commons, impacting the livelihood of the people of the land and resources. She writes: Right to food is not right to be fed by state or NGO, but right to grow food. S.D. does not want takaya lunch, she wants to provide clothes, basic necessities, wants productive capacity, not charity. Earth Democracy demands restoration of wells, land, fishing as justice, not just the aid trucks. Shiva’s critique of Western-backed savagery, text says Western-backed Israeli savagery, matches her analysis of WTO, World Bank backing industrial agriculture. She would call Gaza the ultimate laboratory of food fascism: first occupy 67% of the land east of the yellow line where aquifers, farmland and industry lie, then bomb the remaining and then control aid, this is nothing but a collapse of civilization, this is cold barbarism and this is nazi-israel’s version of self-assertion, depiction of the evil, the one they feared and resisted, they have become the worst version of it.

PALESTINIAN FEMINIST SCHOLARS: SEED, UNCHILDING, AND SUMUD

Shiva gives global south frame, but Palestinian feminists give rooted frame. Where the Palestinians are the seeds themselves, they are the children themselves and they are the justice themselves. Five scholars help us in this regard. These scholars wisdom emerge in the context of colonial settler’s violence and genocide. Vivien Sansour, Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, Battir: Sansour, Bethlehem agronomist-artist, founded Heirloom Seed Library in 2014 to save baladi seeds, baamia, jadu’i watermelon, white cucumber, threatened by occupation and industrial seeds. Her work, The Ecology of Return, argues seed is archive of sumud, steadfastness. Each seed carries memory of farmer, soil and story. Reading Al Mezan: 87% agricultural land destruction includes seed banks, greenhouses where heirloom seedlings were grown. This is not just food loss but seed genocide, erasure of library. Sansour: When they bulldoze field, they bulldoze 100 years of selection by women farmers. Your 69,000 livestock killed includes baladi goats, chickens and animal seed bank. Sansour’s feminist method: women are seed keepers. In Gaza, women kept rooftop gardens, seeds in jars despite siege. Now displaced multiple times, plastic sheet tents, no rooftop and no jar. S.D. originally from Beit Lahia, area famous for strawberries, now displaced to school in Nusseirat. Loss of place is as equal to loss of seed knowledge.

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Unchilding and Necropolitics: Hebrew University, now Queen Mary, Palestinian feminist, author Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding, 2019, Security Theology, Surveillance and the Politics of Fear, 2015. Her concept unchilding: Israeli settler colonialism un-childs Palestinian child, makes child non-child, therefore killable, starve-able, data shows severe wasting among infants and under-five due to shortage infant formula and acute malnutrition among breastfeeding mothers, stunting 12.2%, mortality under-five rose 13.6 to 33.4 per 1,000 live births 2022 to 2025, children queuing at takayas instead of school, bearing burden beyond years. Shalhoub-Kevorkian: Unchilding happens through bureaucracy of food, child becomes case of acute malnutrition. Not a child anymore. 74,200 children requiring treatment by April 2027, each is child forced to become data, data today in the context war and terror is money-capital. S.D.’s children having nothing to eat, unchilding via hunger, making childhood about securing water not playing.