All of Gaza’s universities were leveled in the first year, either by air strikes or by teams of IDF soldiers with carefully placed C4. Hospitals and other healthcare facilities have been repeatedly attacked. Over 90% of housing stock is damaged or destroyed, whole neighborhoods and villages entirely flattened, all kinds of infrastructure rendered unusable.
As famine descended on the Strip in 2025, it’s worth noting the reasons why Gaza is 100% dependent on foreign aid for basic sustenance. Namely, the IDF has systematically destroyed orchards, farmland, fish farms and fishing infrastructure, and other means by which Gazans had historically fed themselves. After decades of shooting at Gazans fishing in their own territorial waters, in August, the IDF announced that anyone who enters the sea anywhere along Gaza’s coast will be shot, meaning that even wading into the sea to cast a net is a death sentence.
The statistics on the ecocide are staggering, but they don’t even begin to represent the emotional impact on Gazans of losing gardens and orchards they’ve tended for years, even generations, and the loss to Gaza’s heritage as a rich agricultural, pastoral and fishing culture.
My short story, “Seeking Citrus,” centers the story of the Jaffa orange. Thick-skinned and nearly seedless, these easily exportable oranges were developed by Palestinians under the rule of the Ottoman Empire in the mid-1800s, and became a major export from the Port of Jaffa. The people of Jaffa were massively displaced in 1948 to make way for the Jewish city of Tel Aviv, many of them fleeing south to what is now known as the Gaza Strip. They took their oranges with them, continuing to grow and export a variety of citrus fruits, but in recent decades, Israel has severely restricted Gazans’ permission to export their citrus and other produce from the Strip.
Nevertheless, Jaffa oranges and other citrus continue to be grown in Gaza.
Or they did, until recently.
“Seeking Citrus” is now available from Muleskinner Journal, Vol. 15: Tension.
MaryahConverse.com 
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