Jun, 2026
“I am a farmer. That’s all you need to know." With support from The Big Heart Foundation, Mohammad is harvesting vegetables in his greenhouse again.
Mohammad works the land he inherited from his father and grandfather in Deir Al Balah, Gaza. For ten years, his days have followed the same routine. He wakes at six, goes to the fields with his sons, checks the crops, waters, plants, then returns home at noon before heading back again in the afternoon.
He has four sons and one daughter. His sons now share the work and help support the family.
“Farming is life,” he says. “If I stop, I lose everything.”
Now, even the smallest decision feels like a gamble. Seeds are harder to find. Water is uncertain. A full season’s work can disappear in a single day.
Still, he plants. “We just try and see what happens,” he says. “There’s no guarantee anymore.”
On November 21, 2023, an airstrike hit his family home. In a single moment, Mohammad lost 22 members of his extended family, his mother, his brothers and sisters, and their children.
A week later, he fled with his immediate family to Rafah. They stayed there for two months before returning to Deir Al Balah, only to be displaced again soon after. Each time they left, the land was left behind, and whatever was growing on it was lost.
After the deadly airstrike, going back to the land wasn’t the same.
The greenhouses were ruined and torn, with plastic flapping in the wind. The irrigation pipes were cut and scattered on the ground. Much of the farmland had been crushed, leaving nothing where the crops used to grow. All the work put in over the years was destroyed in an instant.
Still, he kept going back.
The area had been declared unsafe and empty. But he would return quietly, sometimes crawling on the ground just to reach his land and check on it. Not because he expected to save anything, but because he couldn’t just leave it.
There are two dates he keeps coming back to.
The first stretches back over two decades. On April 22, 2004, Israeli forces bulldozed the land during a military incursion into Deir Al Balah, one of many that swept across Gaza that year. His father suffered a stroke soon after and died. “The land was everything to him,” Mohammad says.
The second date is November 21, 2023, when he lost most of his family in a single day.
Since then, he says he’s not the same person. “I feel broken,” he admits. “Like a farmer who lost more than he could handle.”
“I feel broken. Like a farmer who lost more than he could handle.”
Still, he continues to plant. With support from The Big Heart Foundation, he received plastic sheets, fertilizers, and basic agricultural supplies. The support helped him restore part of his land and begin planting again, bringing life back to the soil once more.
Today, Mohammad grows green peppers and tomatoes. His crops now support the local market, a small but meaningful contribution in a place where fresh food is scarce and precious. Sometimes he goes to the market himself. Other times, his sons take the produce to sell.
That, to him, is something worth holding onto.
And each time something grows, even now, it means the same thing it always did: he didn’t stop.
