JERUSALEM: More than a year into a war that has ricocheted across the Middle East, Israeli troops are still battling Hamas in the most heavily destroyed and isolated part of the Gaza Strip.
In northern Gaza, Hamas militants carry out hit-and-run attacks from bombed-out buildings. Residents say Israeli forces have raided shelters for the displaced, forcing people out at gunpoint. First responders say they can barely operate because of the Israeli bombardment.
Since its Oct. 7 attack into Israel that sparked the war in Gaza, Hamas has taken heavy losses. The recent killing of its top leader, Yahya Sinwar, was viewed as a possible turning point, yet the two sides do not appear any closer to a ceasefire, and Hamas, which still holds scores of hostages, remains the dominant power in Gaza.
The conflict has drawn in militants from Lebanon to Yemen, and their key sponsor, Iran, has inched closer to all-out war with Israel. But in northern Gaza, the war seems stuck in a loop of devastating Israeli offensives, followed by Hamas fighters regrouping.
Israel is once again ordering mass evacuations, severely restricting aid despite global outrage and raiding hospitals it says are used by militants.
In the northern border town of Beit Lahiya — one of the first targets of last year’s ground invasion — two Israeli strikes this week killed at least 88 Palestinians, including dozens of women and children. The military said its target was a spotter on the roof.
As the war grinds on, Israel is resorting to ever more draconian measures. There is even talk of adopting a surrender-or-starve strategy proposed by former generals.
On Monday, Israel passed legislation that could severely restrict the UN agency that is the largest aid provider in Gaza despite protests by the United States and other close allies. It accuses the agency of allowing itself to be infiltrated by Hamas, allegations denied by the UN
Another offensive, as Hamas keeps filling the void
Israel launched its latest offensive in northern Gaza in early October, focusing on Jabaliya, a crowded, decades-old urban refugee camp where it says Hamas had regrouped.
Hamas-led militants killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducted another 250 that day. Israel’s offensive has killed over 43,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health authorities, who do not say how many were combatants but say more than half were women and children.
Israel says it has killed over 17,000 fighters, without providing evidence, and the United States says Hamas is no longer capable of mounting an Oct. 7-style attack.
But Israeli forces have repeatedly returned to areas where they had battled before — only to face renewed attacks. At least 16 Israeli soldiers have been killed in northern Gaza since the latest operation began, including a 41-year-old colonel.
Israel has yet to lay out a plan for postwar Gaza and has rejected a US push for the Western-backed Palestinian Authority to return and govern with Arab support. Plainclothes Hamas security men still patrol most areas.
“It’s endless war,” said Michael Milshtein, a former Israeli military intelligence officer who now leads a Palestinian studies program at Tel Aviv University.
He says Israel has only two options to break the cycle: Either completely reoccupy Gaza, which would require several thousand troops to be stationed there indefinitely. Or secure a ceasefire with Hamas that involves the release of its hostages in exchange for Palestinians in Israeli jails, and a full Israeli withdrawal — the kind of deal that has long eluded US and Arab mediators.
“We are in Jabaliya for the fourth time, and maybe in the next month we will find ourselves there for the fifth and the sixth.” he said.
‘Leave now’ if you care about the lives of your children
Around a million people fled the north, including Gaza City, when Israel ordered its wholesale evacuation at the start of the war. They have not been allowed to return.
Some 400,000 have remained, even as Israel has encircled the area and obliterated entire neighborhoods and critical infrastructure.
The UN says at least 60,000 people have fled to Gaza City in recent weeks from Jabaliya and the northern border towns of Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya.
Residents who remain describe being stuck in their homes for days at a time because of the fighting, with bodies rotting in the streets and rescue teams unable to venture out.
Amna Mustafa and her children were asleep before dawn in a crowded school-turned-shelter in Beit Lahiya last week when an Israeli drone hovering overhead ordered everyone to evacuate. “If you care about your life and the lives of your children, leave now,” it said.
She said men were ordered to strip down and taken away in trucks. The military says it makes every effort to avoid harming civilians, and that such procedures are used to search and detain militants who it says hide among civilians.
Women and children were ordered to walk to a nearby hospital, where Israeli soldiers searched them before allowing most to walk onward to Gaza City, several miles (kilometers) to the south. Mustafa said she spent two nights in the open before moving into a new tent camp in a soccer field.
“There is no food, no water, no blankets, no diapers and no milk for the children,” she said. “We are here waiting for God’s mercy.”
The Israeli military shared drone footage of a similar exodus, showing thousands of people walking down a plowed up road past tanks. It said Hamas had prevented them from leaving before its forces arrived, without providing evidence.
The UN human rights office warned earlier this month that Israel “may be causing the destruction of the Palestinian population in Gaza’s northernmost governate through death and displacement.”
Israel restricts aid despite US warnings
Israel has severely restricted aid to Gaza in October, allowing in only about a third of the humanitarian assistance that entered the previous month.
Alia Zaki, a spokesperson for the World Food Program, said Israel has not allowed UN agencies to deliver aid to the north outside of Gaza City since the latest offensive began.
Col. Elad Goren, a spokesperson for COGAT, the Israeli military body in charge of civilian affairs in Gaza, attributed the lack of aid in the first half of the month to Jewish holiday closures and troop movements.
At a briefing last week, he said there was no need for aid deliveries in Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiya because there was “no population” left in either town. That was before this week’s strikes on Beit Lahiya killed scores of people.
The Biden administration has told Israel to increase the supply of aid entering Gaza, warning it of US laws that could require it to reduce its crucial military support.
Does Israel plan to empty the north?
Palestinians fear Israel is carrying out a strategy proposed by former generals in which aid to the north would be cut off, civilians would be ordered to leave and anyone remaining would be branded a militant. Rights groups say the plan would violate international law.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who visited the region last week for the 11th time since the start of the war, said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told him that Israel had not adopted the plan. The military has denied receiving such orders.
But the Israeli government has not publicly repudiated the plan, even after Blinken’s visit.
Milshtein says the fact that Israel is even considering it is “a post-traumatic phenomenon” born of desperation.
“Many people in the (Israeli military) know it’s a bad idea... But they say: ‘OK, we don’t have any other plan, so let’s try it.”
Israel fights a seemingly endless war in Gaza’s most devastated region
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Israel fights a seemingly endless war in Gaza’s most devastated region
- Since its Oct. 7 attack into Israel that sparked the war in Gaza, Hamas has taken heavy losses
- esidents say Israeli forces raid shelters for the displaced, forcing people out at gunpoint
Gaza rescuers say Israeli strikes kill 35
- Hossam Abu Safia, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, said in a statement that the facility’s generators were hit and that “the army is attempting to target the fuel tank, which is full of fuel and poses a significant fire risk”
- Bassal said eight people including four children were killed in the attack on the school, which had been repurposed as a shelter for Palestinians displaced by the war
GAZA STRIP, Palestinian Territories: Gaza’s civil defense agency said on Sunday that Israeli strikes killed at least 35 Palestinians across the territory, more than 14 months into the Israel-Hamas war.
The violence came even as Palestinian groups involved in the fighting said a ceasefire deal was “closer than ever.”
Israel has faced growing criticism of its actions during the war, triggered by Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, including from rights groups accusing it of “acts of genocide” which the Israeli government strongly denies.
Pope Francis denounced on Sunday the “cruelty” of Israel’s bombardment, highlighting the deaths of children and attacks on schools and hospitals in Gaza.
It was his second such comment in as many days, despite Israel’s accusing the pontiff of “double standards.”
On the ground in Gaza, civil defense agency spokesman Mahmud Bassal said at least 13 people were killed in an air strike on a house in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah belonging to the Abu Samra family.
An AFP photographer saw residents searching through the debris for survivors, while others looked for belongings they could salvage.
In a nearby compound, bodies covered in blankets lay on the sandy ground.
The military said it targeted an Islamic Jihad militant who was operating in Deir el-Balah.
“According to an initial examination, the reported number of casualties resulting from the strike does not align with the information held by the IDF (military),” it said to AFP in a statement, which did not give its own toll.
“We are... losing loved ones every day,” said Deir el-Balah resident Naim Al-Ramlawi.
“I pray to God that a truce will be reached soon” and would allow Gazans to finally “live a decent life, instead of this miserable life,” he said.
The military also confirmed a separate strike further north, on a school in Gaza City.
Bassal said eight people including four children were killed in the attack on the school, which had been repurposed as a shelter for Palestinians displaced by the war.
It was the latest of numerous similar strikes against schools-turned-shelters during the war.
The military says the facilities are used by Hamas Palestinian militants.
In this case it said it carried out a “precise strike” that targeted a Hamas “command and control center” inside the school compound.
AFP images showed mangled concrete slabs and iron beams strewn amid patches of blood at the damaged school building.
Bassal said in a statement that a separate strike, overnight into Sunday, killed three people in Rafah, in the south.
And a drone strike on Sunday morning hit a car in Gaza City, killing four people, the spokesman added.
Late on Sunday, the civil defense agency said seven people were killed when Israeli drones struck tents in the humanitarian area of Al-Mawasi in western Khan Yunis, while the Israeli military said it had targeted a “Hamas terrorist.”
Israel in early October began a major military operation in Gaza’s north, which it said aimed to prevent Hamas from regrouping there.
A United Nations official who visited Gaza City said late last month that people were living in “inhumane conditions with severe food shortages and terrible sanitary conditions.”
On Sunday a hospital director in northern Gaza said Israeli forces were bombing buildings near the facility.
Hossam Abu Safia, director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, said in a statement that the facility’s generators were hit and that “the army is attempting to target the fuel tank, which is full of fuel and poses a significant fire risk.”
Contacted by AFP, the military said it was unaware of any strikes on the hospital, one of only two still operating in northern Gaza.
The unprecedented Hamas attack last year that sparked the war resulted in the deaths of 1,208 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures.
Militants also took 251 hostages, of whom 96 remain in Gaza, including 34 the Israeli military says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed at least 45,259 people, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the United Nations considers reliable.
Hamas and two other Palestinian armed groups said in a rare joint statement on Saturday that an agreement to end the bloodshed was “closer than ever,” after Qatari-hosted talks that followed months of stalled negotiations.
Syria’s new leader says all weapons to come under ‘state control’
- The seizure of power by the Sunni Islamists of HTS — proscribed as a terrorist organization by many governments including the United States — has sparked concern, though the group has in recent years sought to moderate its image
DAMASCUS: Two weeks after seizing power in a sweeping offensive, Syria’s new leader Ahmed Al-Sharaa on Sunday said weapons in the country, including those held by Kurdish-led forces, would come under state control.
Sharaa spoke alongside Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, after earlier meeting with Lebanese Druze leaders and vowing to end “negative interference” in the neighboring country.
Ankara-backed rebels played a key role in supporting Sharaa’s Islamist group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham (HTS), which headed a rebel alliance and seized Damascus on December 8, toppling longtime ruler Bashar Assad.
During a press conference with Fidan, Sharaa said Syria’s armed “factions will begin to announce their dissolution and enter” the army.
“We will absolutely not allow there to be weapons in the country outside state control, whether from the revolutionary factions or the factions present in the SDF area,” he added, referring to the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
Sharaa — also known by his nom de guerre Abu Mohammed Al-Jolani — traded in the olive-green military shirt he sported just days ago for a suit and tie during his meetings on Sunday at the presidential palace.
He also said “we are working on protecting sects and minorities from any attacks that occur between them” and from “external” actors exploiting the situation “to cause sectarian discord.”
“Syria is a country for all and we can coexist together,” he added.
Fidan said sanctions on Syria must “be lifted as soon as possible.” He called for the international community to “mobilize to help Syria get back on its feet and for the displaced people to return.”
Syria’s nearly 14-year civil war killed more than half a million people and displaced more than half its population, with many of them fleeing to neighboring countries, including three million in Turkiye.
Turkiye has maintained strong ties with Syria’s new leaders, and Ankara’s intelligence chief Ibrahim Kalin was in Damascus just four days after Assad fell.
Ankara has continued operations against Kurdish-held areas in northeastern Syria, with a Britain-based war monitor reporting on Saturday that Turkish drone strikes killed five civilians in the area.
A senior German diplomat, Tobias Tunkel, on Sunday said on X that he had spoken with SDF leader Mazloum Abdi about rising tensions in the Kurdish-held border town of Kobani “and urgent steps to diffuse them.”
On Friday a US diplomat in Damascus said Washington was urging a ceasefire between Turkish-backed forces and the SDF around Kobani.
Ankara regards the People’s Protection Units (YPG), the main component of the SDF, as being connected to the militant Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) at home, which both Turkiye and Western allies deem a “terrorist” organization.
During his meeting with visiting Lebanese Druze chiefs Walid and Taymur Jumblatt, Sharaa said Syria would no longer engage in “negative interference in Lebanon at all.”
Syria “will stay at equal distance from all” in Lebanon, Sharaa added, acknowledging that Syria has been a “source of fear and anxiety” for its neighbor.
Walid Jumblatt, long a fierce critic of Assad and his father Hafez who ruled Syria before him, arrived in Damascus on Sunday at the head of a delegation of lawmakers from his parliamentary bloc and Druze religious figures.
The Druze religious minority is spread across Lebanon, Syria, Israel and Jordan.
Walid Jumblatt accuses the former Syrian authorities of having assassinated his father in 1977 during Lebanon’s civil war.
The Syrian army entered Lebanon in 1976, only leaving in 2005 after enormous pressure and mass protests following the assassination of former prime minister Rafic Hariri, a killing attributed to Damascus and its ally, Lebanon’s Iran-backed Hezbollah group.
Assad was an adherent of the Alawite offshoot of Shiite Islam and projected himself as a protector of the country’s religious and ethnic minorities.
The seizure of power by the Sunni Islamists of HTS — proscribed as a terrorist organization by many governments including the United States — has sparked concern, though the group has in recent years sought to moderate its image.
Despite worries over Syria’s future, global powers including the United States and the European Union have stepped up contacts with the war-ravaged country’s new leaders, urging them to guarantee protections for women and minorities.
The foreign leaders have also stressed the importance of combating “terrorism and extremism.”
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran — a major backer of Assad’s administration before it fell — on Sunday predicted “the emergence of a strong, honorable group” that would stand against “insecurity” in Syria.
Assad had long played a strategic role in Iran’s “axis of resistance,” a loose alliance of regional proxy forces aligned against Israel, particularly in facilitating the supply of weapons to Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon.
That axis has suffered heavy blows over the past year with Israel’s devastation of the leadership of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.
Khamenei nonetheless denied that these armed groups acted as proxies, adding that: “If one day we want to take action, we do not need a proxy force.”
2024 Year in Review: Can Lebanon recover from the depredations of Israel-Hezbollah war?
- Months-long conflict compounded the country’s economic and political crises, left thousands displaced from the south
- With the Iran-backed militia weakened, now could be the moment when the state reasserts control over its security
BEIRUT: On the first day of 2024, the Lebanese militia Hezbollah received an Israeli ultimatum. If it did not immediately retreat from the Israeli-Lebanese border and cease its rocket attacks, a full-scale war was imminent. It was the threat that preceded the storm.
The following day, Israeli fire, previously confined to cross-border exchanges initiated by Hezbollah on Oct. 8, 2023, with the stated aim of supporting Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups in Gaza, was turned on the southern suburbs of Beirut for the first time.
An Israeli drone targeted a Hamas office in Haret Hreik, killing the group’s third-ranking leader, Saleh Al-Arouri. Simultaneously, the killings of Hezbollah leaders in southern Lebanon increased exponentially.
The war that Hezbollah launched against northern Israel compounded Lebanon’s existing crises. Already burdened by the financial collapse of 2019, Lebanon entered 2024 grappling with worsening economic and social turmoil.
A political crisis deepened the chaos, as a failure to appoint a president — caused by sharp divisions between Hezbollah and its allies on one side and their opponents on the other — has left the government paralyzed since October 2022.
The flare-up on the border initially displaced 80,000 people from their villages, further straining the country’s economy and increasing poverty. In mid-December 2023, donor countries informed Lebanon of plans to reduce aid for social protection at the start of 2024.
Military confrontations escalated quickly. Hezbollah maintained its “linked fronts” strategy, insisting it would continue its attacks until Israel withdrew from Gaza, while Israel insisted Hezbollah comply with Resolution 1701 and withdraw its forces north of the Litani River.
Between Oct. 8, 2023, and September 2024, Hezbollah launched 1,900 cross-border military attacks, while Israel responded with 8,300 attacks on southern Lebanon. These hostilities caused hundreds of fatalities and displaced entire communities in both southern Lebanon and northern Israel.
Despite intensive diplomatic efforts — primarily by France and the US — no ceasefire was reached during this period. The confrontations intensified, with the Israeli army expanding its targets to the Baalbek region, while Hezbollah extended its strikes to deep Israeli military positions.
Daily clashes revealed Hezbollah’s entrenched military presence in southern Lebanon, including arms depots, artillery emplacements and tunnels, despite the monitoring role of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon under Resolution 1701.
Resolution 1701 mandates the establishment of a weapons-free zone between the Blue Line and the Litani River, except for Lebanese government and international forces. It also prohibits the unauthorized sale or supply of arms to Lebanon.
Hassan Nasrallah, the slain secretary-general of Hezbollah, asserted in 2021 that the group’s fighting force was 100,000 strong.
Funded by Iran and trained by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah boasted a significant arsenal, predominantly Iranian-made and locally manufactured weapons.
After monopolizing resistance operations in the 1980s, Hezbollah morphed into what many analysts considered an Iranian proxy beyond the control of the Lebanese state.
This year’s confrontations broke traditional rules of engagement, imposing new dynamics.
UNIFIL troops in forward positions were not spared from the crossfire, with incidents escalating after Israeli forces entered UNIFIL’s operational zones.
By mid-July, Western embassies in Lebanon were urging their nationals to leave, aware of Israel’s threat to expand the conflict into an all-out war on Lebanon.
Israeli strikes on Hezbollah’s leadership intensified, culminating in the July killing of Radwan Division commander Fouad Shukr in southern Beirut. The following day, Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh was targeted in Tehran, heightening tensions between Israel and Iran.
Israeli airstrikes deepened across southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley, while Hezbollah extended its attacks to Kiryat Shmona, Meron and the outskirts of Haifa and Safed.
Then, on Sept. 17-18, Israel mounted a coordinated attack on thousands of Hezbollah pagers and walkie-talkies, causing explosions that resulted in 42 deaths and more than 3,500 injuries. Although Israel has not claimed responsibility, the attack marked a significant escalation.
By Sept. 27, the killing of Nasrallah and other senior Hezbollah figures in Haret Hreik signaled the start of a wider war. Israeli forces used precision concussion rockets to strike deep into buildings and bunkers, killing Hezbollah commanders and forcing mass evacuations from Beirut’s southern suburbs.
In response, Hezbollah reaffirmed its commitment to linking any ceasefire in Lebanon to one in Gaza. However, by Oct. 1, Israel had intensified its raids, leveling residential buildings and even threatening archaeological sites in Tyre and Baalbek.
The Israeli army also initiated a ground offensive in southern Lebanon, destroying border villages and severing land crossings with Syria to disrupt Hezbollah’s supply lines. Satellite imagery revealed the total destruction of towns like Ayta Al-Shaab and Aitaroun, rendering them uninhabitable.
The devastation affected not only Hezbollah but also Lebanon’s Shiite community, which had invested heavily in the group over decades.
On Nov. 26, Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, with US mediation, finalized a ceasefire agreement. However, the deal was preceded by a massive Israeli escalation in Beirut.
As the ceasefire came into effect, questions arose in Hezbollah strongholds about its decision to separate the Lebanon and Gaza peace tracks. Critics also questioned its commitment to dismantling military installations and cooperating with US-led monitoring efforts.
Despite the ceasefire, violations continued. Meanwhile, the war’s economic toll was becoming apparent.
Amin Salam, Lebanon’s minister of economy, estimated initial losses at $15-20 billion, with 500,000 jobs lost, widespread business closures, and agricultural devastation affecting 900,000 dunams of farmland.
Farmers, industrialists and displaced communities were left without support, deepening Lebanon’s economic paralysis. Municipalities began assessing damages, while Hezbollah sought to distribute Iranian-funded aid to those affected.
Although its leadership and its once mighty arsenal have been badly diminished, and the war in Gaza continues, the fact that Hezbollah has survived the past year of conflict is being projected by the group as a victory in itself.
What is certain is that Lebanon now faces an unprecedented challenge, recovering from a conflict it was ill-equipped to withstand and watching a friendly government in neighboring Syria crumble under an onslaught by opposition forces.
By the same token, now may be the moment many Lebanese had been eagerly waiting for, when the state is in a position to assert its control over internal and external security.
UN investigator says possible to find ‘enough’ proof for Syria prosecutions
- Since Assad’s fall, Petit has been able to visit the country but his team still require authorization to begin their work inside Syria which they have requested
DAMASCUS: The visiting head of a UN investigative body for Syria said Sunday it was possible to find “more than enough” evidence to convict people of crimes against international law, but there was an immediate need to secure and preserve it.
The doors of Syria’s prisons were flung open after an Islamist-led rebel alliance ousted longtime ruler Bashar Assad this month, more than 13 years after his brutal repression of anti-government protests triggered a war that would kill more than 500,000 people.
With families rushing to former prisons, detention centers and alleged mass graves to find any trace of disappeared relatives, many have expressed concern about safeguarding documents and other evidence.
“We have the possibility here to find more than enough evidence left behind to convict those we should prosecute,” said Robert Petit, who heads the International Impartial and Independent Mechanism (IIIM) set up by the UN in 2016 to prepare prosecutions for major international crimes in Syria.
But he noted that preserving evidence would “need a lot of coordination between all the different actors.”
“We can all understand the human impulse to go in and try and find your loved ones,” Petit said. “The fact is, though, that there needs to be a control put in place to restrict access to all these different centers... It needs to be a concerted effort by everyone who has the resources and the powers to do that to freeze that access, preserve it.”
The organization, known as the Mechanism, was not permitted to work in Syria under Assad’s government but was able to document many crimes from abroad.
Since Assad’s fall, Petit has been able to visit the country but his team still require authorization to begin their work inside Syria which they have requested.
He said his team had “documented hundreds of detention centers... Every security center, every military base, every prison had their own either detention or mass graves attached to it.”
“We’re just now beginning to scratch that surface and I think it’s going to be a long time before we know the full extent of it,” he told AFP.
According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor, more than 100,000 people died in Syria’s jails and detention centers from 2011.
The Saydnaya complex, the site of extrajudicial executions, torture and forced disappearances, epitomised the atrocities committed against Assad’s opponents.
Petit compared Saydnaya to the S-21 prison in Cambodia’s capital Phnom Penh, which came to stand for the Khmer Rouge’s wider atrocities and now houses the country’s genocide museum.
The Saydnaya facility will become “an emblematic example of inhumanity,” he said.
Petit said his team had reached out to the new authorities “to get permission to come here and start discussing a framework by which we can conduct our mandate.”
“We had a productive meeting and we’ve asked formally now, according to their instructions, to be able to come back and start the work. So we’re waiting for that response,” he said.
Even without setting foot in Syria, Petit’s 82-member team has gathered huge amounts of evidence of the worst breaches of international law committed during the war.
The hope is that there could now be a national accountability process in Syria and that steps could be taken to finally grant the International Criminal Court jurisdiction to prosecute crimes committed in the country.
Tunisian women herb harvesters struggle with drought
- Tunisia produces around 10,000 tonnes of aromatic and medicinal herbs each year, according to official figures
TUNIS: On a hillside in Tunisia’s northwestern highlands, women scour a sun-scorched field for the wild herbs they rely on for their livelihoods, but droughts are making it ever harder to find the precious plants.
Yet the harvesters say they have little choice but to struggle on, as there are few opportunities in a country hit hard by unemployment, inflation and high living costs.
“There is a huge difference between the situation in the past and what we are living now,” said Mabrouka Athimni, who heads a local collective of women herb harvesters named “Al-Baraka.”
“We’re earning half, sometimes just a third, of what we used to.”
SPEEDREAD
Yet the harvesters say they have little choice but to struggle on, as there are few opportunities in a country hit hard by unemployment and high living costs.
Tunisia produces around 10,000 tonnes of aromatic and medicinal herbs each year, according to official figures.
Rosemary accounts for more than 40 percent of essential oil exports, mainly destined for French and American markets.
For the past 20 years, Athimni’s collective has supported numerous families in Tbainia, a village near the city of Ain Draham in a region with much higher poverty rates than the national average.
Women, who make up around 70 percent of the agricultural workforce, are the main breadwinners for their households in Tbainia.
Tunisia is in its sixth year of drought and has seen its water reserves dwindle, as temperatures have soared past 50 degrees Celsius in some areas during the summer.
The country has 36 dams, mostly in the northwest, but they are currently just 20 percent full — a record low in recent decades.
The Tbainia women said they usually harvested plants like eucalyptus, rosemary and mastic year-round, but shrinking water resources and rare rainfall have siphoned oil output.
“The mountain springs are drying up, and without snow or rain to replenish them, the herbs yield less oil,” said Athimni.
Mongia Soudani, a 58-year-old harvester and mother of three, said her work was her household’s only income. She joined the collective five years ago.
“We used to gather three or four large sacks of herbs per harvest,” she said. “Now, we’re lucky to fill just one.”
Forests in Tunisia cover 1.25 million hectares, about 10 percent of them in the northwestern region.
Wildfires fueled by drought and rising temperatures have ravaged these woodlands, further diminishing the natural resources that women like Soudani depend on.
In the summer of last year, wildfires destroyed around 1,120 hectares near Tbainia.
“Parts of the mountain were consumed by flames, and other women lost everything,” Soudani recalled.
To adapt to some climate-driven challenges, the women received training from international organizations, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, to preserve forest resources.
Still, Athimni struggles to secure a viable income.
“I can’t fulfil my clients’ orders anymore because the harvest has been insufficient,” she said.
The collective has lost a number of its customers as a result, she said.
