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Girl, 13, among missing British citizens after flash flood in Nepal

Thirty-three British citizens including a 13-year-old girl are among more than 400 travellers missing after a flash flood on the Nepal-Tibet border, according to Nepal’s tourism board. The sudden flood happened on the Tibetan side of the Bhote Koshi River at about 8.30am local time on Wednesday. The 33 UK citizens are among at least 341 foreign nationals unaccounted for. Earlier on Wednesday, the tour operator Alpine Eco Trek said a 13-year-old girl was among the missing British nationals, as well as two Irish citizens. Among the missing British nationals are three men aged 65, 64 and 52, and seven women aged 44, 47, 51, 60, 63, 63 and 65, according to travel logs. The firm, which offers guided tours and expeditions in Nepal, confirmed four of its Nepali tour guides – aged 38, 35, 45 and 29 – are missing as well. Kumar Adhikari, the manager of Alpine Eco Trek, said on Wednesday: “I feel so sad. We are just thinking about what to do next. “We are in pain at the moment, deep pain.” Adhikari said the tour group, who were on a nine-day tour to Mount Kailash, were crossing into Tibet from Nepal when they became trapped at the border as the flash floods struck. He said he was in contact with his tour guides until 8.40am when their phones went offline, at which point the group would have been inside Tibet’s immigration office. “We were hoping that inside it was safe,” he said. “But later the video came from China’s government which (showed) even Tibet’s side was hit by the flood.” The tourist board said more than 100 of the missing people were yet to have a nationality confirmed. Police in Nepal said 157 bodies had been recovered and more than 40 people were injured and receiving treatment in hospital. A wall of mud and rock appeared to have collapsed into the river on the Himalayan border of Nepal and Tibet, triggering catastrophic flooding on the Nepali side, Reuters reported. It said verified videos showed dozens of people being swept away at the border. Houses, roads and energy infrastructure were destroyed in Nepal, while officials in Tibet said they feared “major casualties”, with some people missing in the county of Gyirong after ⁠a mudslide hit a border land crossing. Initial reports suggested an earthquake had triggered an avalanche and caused the floods, Shisir Khanal, Nepal’s foreign minister, told the country’s parliament. Eight South Koreans working on a hydropower plant ⁠were missing ⁠and 10 others stranded, South Korea’s foreign ministry ⁠said. Local authorities said tourists in the Rasuwa district of Nepal and other areas along the Bhote Koshi and Trishuli rivers should “exercise extreme caution”, remain in safe areas and move to higher ground if required. Visitors were urged to stay in regular contact with hotels and travel agencies. People planning to travel to the affected areas in the coming days were warned to postpone their journeys. The UK’s foreign secretary, Ed Miliband, said: “I am deeply concerned to hear of the flash floods on the Nepal-China border. All my thoughts are with those affected and with British nationals in the area and their relatives here at home.” The British embassy in Kathmandu urged people in affected areas to follow local advice. A joint statement with the embassies of Australia, the EU, Finland, France, Norway and Switzerland said: “We are deeply saddened by the devastating flooding in Rasuwa and Nuwakot districts and surrounding areas. Our thoughts are with all those affected by this disaster. We express our solidarity with the people of Nepal during this difficult time. “We encourage all those in affected areas to follow the guidance of local authorities and official safety advisories as the situation continues to evolve.”

‘Escape wizard’ who has broken out of four prisons is arrested in Spain

Police in Spain have arrested a dangerous Albanian criminal nicknamed the “escape wizard” who has managed to break out of four jails in Italy and Belgium by sawing through bars, clambering down knotted sheets and even using a human pyramid to breach prison walls. The fugitive, who has not been officially named, was arrested after officers from the Policía Nacional force discovered he was living in the north-eastern Spanish city of Tarragona. He was the subject of a European arrest warrant issued by the Italian authorities. Spanish police identified the man by the initials TT, which correspond to those of Toma Taulant, an Albanian national known in Italian media as the “mago della fuga”, or “escape wizard”. Before escaping from a maximum-security prison in Milan eight months ago, he was serving a prison sentence due to end in 2048 for a series of offences including violent robbery, theft and drug dealing, according to Italian media reports cited by Agence France-Presse. “It sounds like something out of a film, but sometimes reality is stranger than fiction,” the Policía Nacional said in a statement that described him as “the master of escapes”. “He escaped from a jail in [the Umbrian city of] Terni in 2009, from a jail in Parma in 2013 and from a Belgian prison that same year after using a human pyramid to climb over the wall,” the police said. “His latest escape, in December 2025, came after he managed to break out of a maximum-security prison in Italy after sawing through the bars and climbing out of the window down knotted sheets.” According to the statement, the “very dangerous” fugitive was arrested in Tarragona last Friday, putting up “strong and active resistance” as officers swooped. “The man was accompanied by a number of his compatriots who tried to stop him being arrested, including one man who struck and injured two officers,” the force said. Police are still looking for the assailant but have recovered a Sig Sauer pistol that was discarded by one of the suspect’s associates. Once in custody, the man was found to be in possession of fake identity documents, which revealed that he had a criminal record in the Catalan city of Girona for possession of weapons and explosives. He was also found to be carrying two €500 banknotes that are thought to have been counterfeited, which have been sent to the Bank of Spain for investigation. The suspect was denied bail and has been remanded in custody at a jail in Tarragona while he awaits extradition to Italy.

Only sanctions imposed on Israel will work | Letter

How long does it take for the penny to drop in Downing Street and the Foreign Office (Israel’s Ben-Gvir posts video of gallows site for hanging Palestinians, 20 August)? Israeli individuals have had sanctions imposed on them for over a year with absolutely no effect, and it is likely that people such as Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security, see them as some sort of badge of honour. Andy Burnham and Ed Miliband must realise by now that the only sanctions likely to have any effect are those imposed against the state of Israel, so denouncing the issue of tenders for the E1 settlement near Jerusalem as an “unacceptable and destructive act ” is just box-ticking. It’s all very well for Miliband to say that all Israeli settlements in the West Bank are a “flagrant breach of international law”, but their construction has been going on for years; had the UK and others had the courage to take action when the first ones were built, who knows how many lives could have been saved? Now, with the UN international commission of inquiry reporting that there is ongoing genocide in Gaza, war crimes and ethnic cleansing being carried out in the West Bank, and the callous murder of journalists and “ecocide” in southern Lebanon, criticising recent events as illegal and inhumane, while taking no effective action, is frankly pathetic. Bernie Evans Liverpool • Have an opinion on anything you’ve read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.

South African police arrest two Thai men for allegedly smuggling parrot eggs

South African police have arrested two Thai nationals in separate incidents for allegedly attempting to smuggle endangered parrot eggs out of the country as authorities try to stem the tide of wildlife trafficking. A 50-year-old Thai national was arrested at OR Tambo international airport in Johannesburg on 20 August, carrying 50 bird eggs in a homemade incubator in a hand-luggage bag, South Africa’s environment ministry said in a statement. The ministry said preliminary investigations indicated that the eggs were from parrot species listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites), which regulates international trade in wild animals and plants to ensure species do not become extinct. It did not specify which species. Another Thai national, a 23-year-old, was arrested at the same airport on 16 July, allegedly trying to smuggle 418 parrot eggs in two homemade incubator bags. Thailand’s embassy in South Africa did not immediately respond to a request for comment. South Africa is battling wildlife smuggling on several fronts, from poached rhino horns and the bones of illegally farmed tigers to abalone shellfish and succulent plants. The environment ministry said: “The illegal collection and trafficking of parrot eggs pose a serious threat to wild bird populations and animal welfare. Eggs are often concealed in improvised incubation devices and transported under conditions that significantly compromise their viability and endanger the welfare of developing embryos and hatchlings.” Staff at the National Zoological Garden in Pretoria are incubating the seized eggs, the ministry said. “Several of the rescued eggs have successfully hatched and the chicks are receiving intensive veterinary and husbandry care to maximise their chances of survival,” the statement added. The ministry said the arrests were carried out after a “joint intelligence-driven operation” led by its Environmental Management Inspectorate, known as the “Green Scorpions”, and police intelligence, border and endangered species units. South Africa punishes the illegal export of Cites-listed species with a fine of 10m rand (£460,000), up to 10 years in prison or both.

Why are European leaders staying silent after our summer of climate shock?

The climate crisis means “we’re going to have to change everything – the way we live, the way we produce, the way we trade,” France’s veteran radical-left firebrand, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, told the summer congress of his France Insoumise party last weekend. The term “climate change”, said Mélenchon – the most likely rival to Marine Le Pen in next year’s presidential run-off, according to one poll this week – may sound “almost reassuring”, but its actual impact will feel like “landing on another planet whenever we leave home”. The speech is notable because despite the four heatwaves that have scorched Europe this summer, shattering temperature records, fanning unprecedented fires and causing thousands of excess deaths, few politicians want to talk about climate action. Europe is the world’s fastest-warming continent, heating up twice as quickly as elsewhere. The consequences, as UN climate chief Simon Stiell puts it, are “reaching national emergency levels”. And yet major policy speeches by Europe’s political leaders addressing the climate crisis, making plain its causes, and laying out the changes that will be needed to live with it can be counted on the fingers of one hand. French voters have faced “silence from some politicians and inadequate pronouncements or demagoguery from others”, said Le Monde in a stark editorial, warning that “decision-makers on both the right and the left are losing credibility”. People want “a political message that translates into action, and sheds light on the future”, it said. The gap between “citizens’ heightened awareness of the crisis and the lack of commitment from their elected officials to address it” will trigger mounting frustration and anger. A mid-July Ipsos poll found environmental protection had jumped 12 points from June to become French voters’ fourth greatest concern, after what the pollster described as “a first real experience of what the hell of a significantly hotter world might look like”. In the UK too, Labour party activists worry that despite the ever more visible impacts of the climate crisis, there has been no major political push from the government on the issue, even as voters become increasingly convinced of the need for action. And while Friedrich Merz said this week action was needed to “curb climate change and adapt to the consequences” (though not at a cost to German industry), he’s been accused all summer of ducking the issue for fear of boosting the climate-sceptic, far-right AfD. There are, of course, exceptions. Spain’s outspoken prime minister, Pedro Sánchez (pictured top), has long warned that “climate change kills”, and recently stressed: “It’s not enough to address the consequences; what we have to do is reduce its causes.” A French centre-left presidential contender, Raphäel Glucksmann, spoke this week of the need for an “ecological transformation” ending the use of fossil fuels, and pledged a 100-day “ecological revolution” if elected president (which looks extremely unlikely). But the silence from most mainstream politicians is deafening, says Jean Jouzel, a veteran French climatologist. The political class in general, he says, “have simply not yet engaged with the reality of global heating. They have to tackle it head-on.” The root of the problem, Jouzel suggests, is that “politicians live in the short-term. Their horizon is avoiding any damage during their period in office. For me, a real political leader … has the courage to look to the medium and the long-term.” Short-termism, political polarisation and cost-of-living fears have, in effect, silenced leaders across Europe, as populist and far-right parties successfully frame green laws as an “ideological mantra” and the elite’s punishment for “ordinary working people”. The reasoning is clear: voters suffering high energy bills, food inflation and stagnating wages are unlikely to hail demands for real financial and lifestyle sacrifices in pursuit of an ill-defined climate gain. Carbon taxes and boiler restrictions carry electoral risk. *** Local over global But that reluctance to address the real issue has shifted Europe’s climate debate away from long-term carbon reduction towards more localised adaptation – which, perhaps inevitably, has itself now become a battleground in the continent’s culture wars. Air conditioning is a prime example, now loudly touted on Europe’s right as a vital symbol of personal freedom and technological comfort, but widely decried by the left as environmentally irresponsible and symptomatic of long-term planning failures. “If I am elected president, I will put into place a massive air-conditioning plan,” Le Pen trumpeted this summer, arguing the technology had little or no impact on global heating: “When environmentalists don’t want something, they twist the studies.” The risk in all this is that by focusing on necessary but essentially reactive coping measures, leaders wind up reducing the existential challenges of global heating to debates over consumer choice and comfort that can fit into an electoral cycle. Meanwhile, vital long-term carbon reduction gets pushed further and further into the background. As Dutch MEP, Gerben-Jan Gerbrandy, argues: “Nobody should feel guilty for wanting relief from extreme heat. Air conditioning saves lives.” However, he continues, neither should we “accept the cynical argument that the answer to rising temperatures is simply to install more air conditioning – while abandoning the very policies designed to tackle the causes of those rising temperatures”. Be that as it may, in the multiple European countries with national elections coming up over the next 18 months – including France, Italy and Spain – the climate emergency remains, for the time being at least, largely absent from the debate. And that’s regrettable, because as Jouzel says: “Global heating is no longer a scientific debate. It’s a very real political problem.” Grégoire Leménager, writing in the French weekly Le Nouvel Obs, agreed. “Looking the other way is no longer an option,” he said. Nothing is simple, but after the summer Europe has just endured, politicians who “refuse to make climate action a cornerstone of their manifestos” will, he continued, “be exposed for what they are: criminal accomplices to an inevitable defeat”. To receive the complete version of This Is Europe in your inbox every Wednesday, please subscribe here.

Tell us: have you been affected by the flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border?

Hundreds are missing and at least 22 people have died after torrential floods ⁠hit the Himalayan border areas of ⁠Nepal and in Tibet in China. An avalanche of ice and rock triggered massive flash floods causing widespread damage to villages and infrastructure. Officials said 384 tourists, including 291 from countries including India, the United States, the United Kingdom and Malaysia, were reported missing. If you’ve been affected by the flash floods on the Nepal-Tibet border, we’d like to hear from you. Though we’d like to hear from you, your safety and security are most important. When recording or sharing your content with us, please put your welfare and the welfare of others first. Extreme weather events can be very unpredictable and carry very real risks.

‘A Bible-sized blind spot’: congressman sounds alarm on rising Christian nationalism

Crosses, shofars and “Appeal to Heaven” flags. Rioters praying with their hands aloft as police officers are brutalised. January 6 2021 is widely remembered as a deadly insurrection by supporters of Donald Trump; but for Congressman Jared Huffman, who was locked down alone in his office that day, something else stands out. It was a very Christian coup. “This Christian nationalist movement that I had seen growing so much stronger and more militant during my time in Congress erupted in plain view,” Huffman, 62, says by phone from his home in Marin county, California. “I truly believed January 6 would be the wake-up call our country needed to confront this movement to understand it and to hold it to account. “Unfortunately, the country went back to sleep and many of my own colleagues who the mob wanted to kill that day didn’t even seem to notice the religious elements of the group that was trying to kill them.” That is a big part of why Huffman is now deciding to sound an alarm of his own with a new book, No Prophets: The Fight to Save Democracy from Christian Nationalism. Contending that the US has a “Bible-sized blind spot”, it argues that the theocratic insurgency has only grown more powerful after Trump’s return to power and is now the country’s most dangerous political movement – a greater threat to science, education and freedom than most people realise. No one is better qualified to make this case than Huffman, the only current member of Congress to admit he does not believe in God. He grew up in Independence, Missouri – the home of former president Harry Truman and historic headquarters of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (now the Community of Christ), an offshoot of Mormonism. A devout Christian, Huffman was ordained into its priesthood. The first crack in his faith occurred during his sophomore year of college at UC Santa Barbara. The sudden death of his father triggered some questioning. “The bottom line is the supernatural tenets of my faith, the God belief, the notion of heaven and hell and miracles and so forth, no longer worked for me. That’s a hard thing when you lose your faith. “It took me years of reflecting and thinking about it to determine that the things I liked about my religious upbringing, the universal values that are very much part of the Christian gospel, are available in all sorts of faith perspectives, including non-belief. They’re things that good people often innately do and think.” Huffman settled on the label humanist. “The reason I prefer that to atheist is because atheist is a negative statement about what you don’t believe. That feels like it reduces me. Humanism is a much more affirmative expression of what you do believe, and humanists believe we have a duty to lead moral and ethical lives based on science and facts and reason. You choose to be a good person not because of some sky god or some inducement of an afterlife or fear of hell.” For decades, Huffman kept his secular worldview private. In 2013, on his first day in Congress, he stood sheepishly before House speaker John Boehner, who asked, “Alright, who’s going to hold the Bible?” for the swearing-in photo-op. Huffman’s devout mother was beaming in the background. Caught off guard, Huffman put his hand on a Bible, a moment that left him feeling “sullied and hypocritical”. The turning point came in 2017. Huffman’s mother had died, removing the fear of breaking her heart, and Trump had entered the White House, opening the floodgates of religious extremism. But when Huffman decided to go public as a non-believer, his wife, brother, senior staff and political advisers warned him it was “a terrible, career-wrecking idea”. He explains: “They were giving me good advice because the polling to this day shows that the worst label you could attach to a candidate for public office in the United States is ‘atheist’. I appreciated them trying to protect me, but I also knew that I felt increasingly uncomfortable hiding my moral framework and ducking these questions about religion. I felt increasingly drawn into the fight against all of these encroachments of religious extremism into our government. I was on a collision course with ‘coming out’, if you will, and I decided to do it against that advice.” Huffman received support from individuals including House of Representatives minority leader Nancy Pelosi, congressman Jamie Raskin, with whom he founded the Congressional Freethought Caucus, and House chaplain Father Pat Conroy, a guitar-playing priest who jammed with Huffman after hours. Conroy told Huffman that he wished more members of Congress would be honest about what they believed. Huffman says: “I’m very glad I did it, but have I encountered some harsh judgments and prejudices? Absolutely. I’ve been called every name in the book. I have Democratic colleagues who are devout Christians who seem to take some offence at my public existence as a non-believer. “They seem to feel that threatens or insults them as Christians, which is baffling, of course, because I don’t have a quarrel with Christianity or Christians, but it does speak to the privileged status of Christians not just within the Republican party, where Christian nationalism has become a defining feature, but even among my fellow Democrats.” He defines “Christian privilege” as a deeply ingrained cultural taboo that protects home-grown religious radicalism from the same state and media scrutiny instantly applied to minority or foreign faiths. That Christian privilege was manifested in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, Huffman argues, when many fellow members of Congress did not even seem to notice the religious elements of the group trying to kill them. It was evident again, he asserts, in one of the most consequential political cover-ups in recent history: the deliberate erasure of Christian nationalism from the final report of the House January 6 select committee. As the committee raced toward its deadline at the end of 2022, its staff split into colour-coded drafting teams. The “Purple Team” was tasked with investigating rightwing radicalism, and they meticulously documented the role of charismatic evangelical networks, particularly the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), in radicalising and mobilising the shock troops of the insurrection. Chairman Bennie Thompson told Huffman: “We asked the Purple Team to look into the role of religion in what happened, and they came back with a report that shows those people, rightwing Christian extremists, actually had a lot to do with it.” But then came a veto. Liz Cheney, the committee’s formidable vice-chair, demanded the entire section be excised. She argued that focusing on Christian nationalism would “distract” from Trump’s personal culpability and alienate conservative Christian voters. Cheney’s argument prevailed. Huffman says: “I give her huge credit for standing up to Trump at a time when almost no other Republicans would do it. That courage was very real, but she also did the country a huge disservice with her Christian privilege.” If the attackers had worn hijabs or carried Qurans, he contends, the select committee report would have dissected their religious connections with “surgical precision”. Against this backdrop, Huffman argues that modern Christian nationalism is not a monolith but a temporary coalition of three distinct, volatile and historically hostile religious subcultures, held together by the glue of Trump. The biggest and politically most potent is NAR, a decentralised network of self-declared “apostles” and “prophets” who reject traditional denominational authority in favour of direct revelation. NAR prophets such as Paula White-Cain and Lance Wallnau cast Trump as a modern King Cyrus – a flawed, pagan ruler anointed by God to save his chosen people – to provide a divine permission structure for millions of evangelicals to overlook Trump’s moral failings. On the Catholic flank are the “Rad Trads”, a small but highly influential subculture that resent the liberalising Vatican II reforms of the 1960s and believes that Catholic moral authority should govern the state. Sympathisers include vice-president JD Vance and political strategist Steve Bannon. Neo-nazi agitator Nick Fuentes openly calls for a “Catholic monarchy” to replace the US constitution. Perhaps the most sophisticated and economically formidable faction is the “Theobros”, a network of Protestant Reconstructionists led by Pastor Doug Wilson of Moscow, Idaho. Wilson advocates for “Mere Christendom”, a system where the Apostle’s Creed is codified into the US constitution, women and non-Christians are stripped of voting rights. The Theobros have forged a powerful “Theo-tech bromance” with Silicon Valley venture capitalists such as Peter Thiel. The ultimate Theobro is Pete Hegseth, Trump’s self-styled “secretary of war”, whose body is adorned with Crusader tattoos – including “Deus vult” (God wills it) and the Jerusalem cross – and who hosts a workday “Secretary of Defense Christian Prayer & Worship Service” in the Pentagon auditorium, broadcast live on internal networks. Huffman comments: “The nicest thing I can say about Pete Hegseth is to thank him for his lack of subtlety. He is so cartoonish in his Christian nationalism that he provides a great case study. “If anybody wants to know what Christian nationalism looks like in its most strident militant form, he embodies it literally in the tattoos on his own body but certainly in the rampant proselytising that he does and these overt power plays to institutionalise his version of Christianity in Pentagon prayer services once a month with radical hate preachers brought in as honoured guests.” Nowhere is the advance of Christian nationalism more striking than inside the Capitol itself, which Huffman describes as a “shadow theocracy”. Visitors on official tours see Statuary Hall and hear speeches on the separation of powers; they do not see the sprawling, tax-subsidised “ministry-industrial complex” operating under the dome. Pastors lurk like lobbyists in the Capitol hallways, Huffman writes. The most influential is Ralph Drollinger’s Capitol Ministries, which hosts weekly Bible studies for members of the House, Senate and White House cabinet. Drollinger, a 7’2” former basketball player, teaches a “free-market gospel” that frames environmentalism as a sin against God’s dominion mandate and instructs cabinet members on how to inject biblical literalism into federal policy. More than a hundred years have passed since Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was debated in the “Scopes monkey trial” in Dayton, Tennessee. But ideas long taken for granted are once again under attack. Huffman warns that Christian nationalism’s ultimate target is Enlightenment values that date back to Thomas Jefferson and the founding of the US in 1776. In a chapter entitled “The Dumbing of America”, he quotes Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” He also profiles Mary Miller of Illinois, who began her congressional career in 2021 by quoting Adolf Hitler to a Moms for America rally: “Hitler was right, whoever has the youth has the future.” In June last year, Miller had a moral panic when a Sikh cleric, Giani Surinder Singh, delivered a guest prayer in the House chamber. Assuming Singh was a Muslim, Miller tweeted: “America was founded as a Christian nation, and I believe our government should reflect that truth ... May God have mercy!” On climate science, Miller is equally blunt, dismissing solar panels because God “controls the sun, and the sun controls the weather”. Huffman reflects: “This is potentially the unravelling of a 250-year truce between fundamentalist Christians and the Enlightenment. The stakes are much higher now than even in Jefferson’s time because then it was just about the form of government and individual liberty and protecting us against religious tyranny. But today, it’s about whether we cure the next disease or pandemic and whether we can survive the climate crisis. We look to these institutions of research and science and knowledge to allow us to keep living on this planet at a time when we’ve created some terrible threats to our own existence.” Huffman insists the fight is still winnable but will require a broad coalition that includes moderate Christians, non-Christians and secular Americans. “We need to reckon with our Christian privilege problem, our Bible-sized blind spot when it comes to just speaking without fear or favour about this movement that poses as Christian. We’ve got to get more comfortable working across different faith perspectives in a pro-democracy coalition.” But he also offers a warning from history: “I am thinking a lot these days about the final unraveling of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s. From what I have read and studied about that, Hitler and his National Socialist party were a small minority that could easily have been stopped right up to the end had the centrist parties and the left been able to overcome their differences and work together. “They couldn’t do it, and so they left the lane wide open for Hitler to become chancellor, and the rest is a very grim part of our history. That’s absolutely how the United States could unravel and evolve into fascism – and Christo-fascism in our case.”

On scraps of land and under constant threat, Gaza farmers struggle to survive

As Gaza’s population of 2.1 million has been hemmed into an ever smaller slice of the territory, farmers are using every last remaining patch of unspoiled earth, no matter how tiny, in their struggle to survive. With severe shortages of water, fertiliser and pesticide, and with more than 80% of greenhouses ruined, it has taken inventiveness and determination to clear land of debris and coax new seedlings into life. Moreover, venturing out into the open to tend to plants can be deadly. Saqer Abu Rabee’s eldest son and brother were killed while at work growing food for their communities on their small agricultural plots in Beit Lahiya in northern Gaza. His son Yousef was 24 when he was killed by a drone-fired missile in October 2024. Abu Rabee was working in the fields 10 metres from his son when it happened. “The missile was aimed directly at him and I have no doubt that he was the intended target,” Abu Rabee said. Yousef was well known locally as the driving force behind a collective first called We’ll Plant It and now simply Our Land, which brought together volunteers and encouraged farmers to go back to the land to restore agriculture in the area. “They decided to target him directly,” said Abu Rabee, who stressed his son had no political affiliations. “Before his death, we received daily threats from the Israeli army. They shelled our area every day three or four times while I was working alongside the labourers.” Abu Rabee’s brother Bilal was killed on 2 July after he went to retrieve some agricultural supplies from a destroyed building. His death came nine months into a partial ceasefire during which Israeli forces have killed more than 1,200 Palestinians. Abu Rabee is convinced farmers have become prime targets because of their role in sustaining Palestinian communities among Gaza’s ruins. The Israel Defense Forces deny targeting farmers or any civilians, saying they have only responded to imminent threats from Hamas since the October ceasefire. Despite the risks, Abu Rabee, 48, is still at work every day cultivating a 1.4-hectare (3.4-acre) plot in Beit Lahiya that was an orchard of orange trees before the war. He said the orchard was bulldozed by the Israeli army. “We cleared it and rehabilitated it using only basic tools, manual labour and tremendous human effort. It took a great deal of time and hard work before it was ready for cultivation again,” he said. Out of that scrap of land, Abu Rabee says his family have produced hundreds of thousands of aubergine, tomato and pepper seedlings. They raise cash by growing their own aubergines to sell to wholesale traders, while most of the seedlings are distributed to other farmers or to individual households to plant in patches of earth around their homes and tents. He says the supply has transformed the local food market. Aubergines now cost less than two shekels a kilogram, compared with 40 shekels a few months ago. Peppers and mulukhiyah, a dark green leafy vegetable, are now selling at a tenth of their market price earlier this year. “What has happened is that Beit Lahiya has regained a degree of self-sufficiency,” Abu Rabee said. “In my view, without Beit Lahiya, Gaza would face famine. Before the war, it was considered the food basket of Gaza Strip because of its fertile soil, fresh groundwater and light, productive land.” Increased aid and commercial deliveries under the ceasefire have brought Gaza back from the abyss of last year’s famine conditions, but according to UN agencies there are still 1.4 million people – 67% of Gaza’s population – facing crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse. Much of the commercial inflows of food are of poor nutritional quality. The director general of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Qu Dongyu, has said the limited recovery will remain fragile without domestic food production. “Food security in Gaza cannot recover unless local food production starts again and farmers, herders, fishers and other producers can rebuild their livelihoods,” Qu said in July. Based on satellite data, the FAO estimates that little more than a quarter of Gaza’s total prewar cropland, 4,100 hectares, remains accessible, and only about 3%, 450 hectares, is undamaged, free of debris and ready for immediate cultivation. Most of Gaza’s prewar farmland is under Israeli military occupation, and the proportion has grown as the army has pushed the “yellow line” steadily forward over the course of the ceasefire. Using specialised satellite imagery, the human rights advocacy group Forensic Architecture carried out a survey of flora across Gaza as a measurable proxy for cultivable land. It found that nearly 68% of the territory’s flora was on the Israeli side of the yellow line and another 5% was inside a buffer zone declared by the army, delineated on maps with an orange line, where it is extremely dangerous for Palestinians to venture. Bilal Abu Rabee, Saqer’s brother, was shot dead along with another man when they came within range of Israeli sniper positions. Their bodies were left out in the open for two days because it was too dangerous for their relatives to retrieve them. The family’s old farm is now under Israeli control, so after the ceasefire was declared they came to Beit Lahiya to try to start again from scratch on leased land. Since last October the army has pushed the yellow line forward, swallowing up nearby farms in west Beit Lahiya. “The expansion has had a devastating impact on the agricultural sector,” Abu Rabee said. “Fertile farmland that farmers had worked tirelessly to cultivate after spending everything they had or even borrowing money, simply it was seized just as it was ready for harvest, leaving them with nothing.” On the remaining land, the challenges appear endless. With hardly any livestock left, there is little homegrown dung-based fertiliser, so the family are improvising by piling decaying vegetation under tarpaulins. Meanwhile, they are battling nematodes and other soil infestations and a chronic lack of water, all the time under the constant, unpredictable threat of death. Abu Rabee said: “Stray bullets frequently reach this area and strike many places around us. Many people have also been wounded in the streets as a result of indiscriminate attacks. I fear for my own life simply because I’m a farmer.”