By Eva Bartlett
“KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip (IPS/GIN) - For farmers along the Gaza Strip's border with Israel, being shot by Israeli soldiers was a concern before December's violence, and it still is. Now they have lost crops in a three-week siege.

They're always shooting at us. Every day they shoot at us,” said Alaa Samour, 19, pulling aside his shirt to show a scar on his shoulder. Mr. Samour said he was shot Dec. 28 last year by Israeli soldiers positioned along the border fence near New Abassan village, east of Khan Younis in the south of the Gaza Strip.
“We were cutting parsley like we do almost every day, and the soldiers began shooting. We started crawling away. When I got out of the line of fire, I realized my shoulder was bleeding and that I had been shot.”

A month later, out of necessity, Mr. Samour was back in the fields. Like many other impoverished laborers from the Khan Younis area, Mr. Samour is employed by farmers to harvest parsley, spinach and pea crops in the fertile Eastern region. He brings home $5 per day of labor, his contribution to a family where the father cannot earn enough to cover their food needs.
Sayed Abu Nsereh works on the same land. Well accustomed to the firing from the Israeli soldiers at the border, Abu Nsereh explains how farmers on the field crawl to a “safe” area—a slight depression in the field—when the shooting begins. Lying face down, they are temporarily safe, though they must still wait for the shooting to cease and the soldiers to leave before they can leave.

The field is roughly halfway into a band of land a little more than a half-mile wide running along the Gaza side of the Green Line (Gaza's border with Israel), an area unilaterally designated by Israeli authorities as the “buffer zone,” or more recently, the “no-go zone.” At its inception a decade ago, the “buffer zone” encompassed an almost 500-foot-wide stretch of land flanking the border south to north.

In this region Palestinians could not walk, live or work due to what Israel described as “security reasons.” It became wasted land, though extremely fertile.
At the end of Israel's three weeks of attacks on Gaza in December and January which left more than 1,450 dead and over 5,000 injured, many critically so, Israeli authorities declared an expansion of the “buffer zone” into what they dubbed a no-go zone expropriating yet more land from farmers and civilians in the area.

Prior to the attacks on Gaza, PARC reported that of the 42,000 acres of cultivable land in the Gaza Strip, 12,000 acres had been damaged by the Israeli army. These are the most fertile and productive agricultural areas, the “food basket” areas, the group reports. Following the attacks on Gaza, international bodies put the amount of destroyed land much higher, farmland they say is now damaged or unusable.