These seeds — for rare, indigenous, hardy strains of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, zucchini, and others collected from local farms in the West Bank and Gaza — weren’t just any seeds. They were living libraries of Palestinian agricultural knowledge, carrying genetic traits for drought resistance, soil adaptation, and nutritional density that commercial varieties lack.

Traditional Palestinian farming practices integrated olive groves with wheat, barley, legumes, and tree crops in polycultures that maximized both biodiversity and resilience. This agricultural system sustained Palestinian communities for millennia while maintaining soil health and water conservation.

Indigenous seed varieties, once lost, cannot be recreated — they represent thousands of years of co-evolution between plants, soil, climate, and human knowledge systems. Their destruction constitutes a temporal amputation — the severing of a community’s ability to reproduce itself across generations.

This breaks my heart. My husband often reminisces on fruits and veggies from home. He’s tried many times to tell me they’re different, that I just don’t understand. I always think of Gaza as just one massive city but they do, or at least did, have a lot of micro farming.

More of his home is being erased forever. Things he will never be able to share with our daughter. He misses home so much but his family always tells him he’s lucky. That he has a memory of Gaza that is gone. And to hold space for that memory. To cherish what once was.

So many neighbors and friends are dead. The roads and streets he once knew gone. His own home, meant as the legacy for his son, turned into tank tracks for Israel. Not a stone is left of a three story building. They demolished it back when they did that raid from the US “aid” pier. Bulldozing it into the massive crater of the neighboring family’s home who Israel murdered all except for one unlucky son who was pulled alive from the rubble. His last memories of his father crouched praying fajr when they were struck. His father, mother, brothers, sisters, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins all dead and gone forever. Left behind as a child in a world full of suffering and starvation.

I’m rambling, but this is just one more added trauma. So many people are dead. People who could have held space for this knowledge outside of a seed bank. I hate Israel targets things like city archives too. Generations of pictures, hereditary files, and documents. Many of which weren’t digitized. And they effectively erased his university. We don’t even know if records were held externally or how that works. He showed me the video of them destroying it and reminisced on his stories from college. Another symbol of his youth just gone.

It’s just one rolling punch after another. Humans aren’t built for a capacity of this level of trauma. Not only are your friends, family and neighbors taken from you but they’re erasing everything you once knew as your reality. His job is to hold space for Gaza that was and it breaks my heart. All I can do is listen to stories of a world that is being erased day by day with no ability or recourse to stop it.