Gazan beekeepers struggle to recover after war wipes out honey production

GAZA/CAIRO (Reuters) — Standing on the roof of a war-damaged building overlooking the ruins of Gaza City, beekeeper Ibrahim al-Dabba gently lifts a honeycomb frame as bees buzz around him.

“Bees require trees. We are raising bees amongst rubble,” he said.

For Gaza’s beekeepers, the struggle to rebuild their livelihoods after more than two years of war is about much more than honey. It is also about preserving one of nature’s most important pollinators in a territory where farmland has been devastated and access to orchards near the border with Israel has been cut off.

Before the war, the beekeepers kept around 30,000 hives, according to agricultural engineer and beekeeper Rateb Sammour.

Honey production had already been declining from some 400 metric tons annually several years ago to roughly half that amount as climate change affected the flowering seasons.

The conflict dealt a far greater blow, however. Sammour, a well-known Gaza beekeeper and honey producer, estimates around 700 hives remain, with beekeepers dividing hives to help maintain the numbers.

Sammour puts the honey production at only 10% of what it was before the war.

Across much of Gaza, where vast neighborhoods remain reduced to wreckage, beekeepers are salvaging what they can. Some have placed hives on rooftops because agricultural land is inaccessible or destroyed. Others are using sugar supplements to increase the food for their bees in places where there is no meaningful forage.

Israel effectively controlled an estimated 64% of Gaza by late April. Nearly all of the territory’s roughly 2 million residents are concentrated in a narrow coastal area under Hamas control, living largely in damaged buildings or makeshift shelters and facing dire humanitarian conditions.

Fighting has largely subsided since an October 2025 ceasefire in Gaza went into effect, following two years of brutal war sparked by the Hamas-led terror invasion of southern Israel on October 7, 2023. But reconstruction of the war-torn enclave has effectively stalled and Israel has continued sporadic airstrikes in the Strip against Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets.

After the ceasefire last October, Dabba, 49, hoped to return to a trade passed down through generations. Instead, he found almost nothing left.

“We couldn’t find bees, we couldn’t find equipment, we couldn’t find frames, we couldn’t find anything to get us back to bees,” he said.

“We are even forbidden from entering agricultural areas,” Dabba said, explaining how they are within the yellow line military demarcation established under the ceasefire.

Starting over came at a steep cost. Dabba said he paid NIS 10,000 ($3,245) for just three hives, excluding equipment.

In the central Gaza camp of Nuseirat, beekeeper Fahd al-Dahdouh, 32, spends his days repairing shattered hive boxes recovered from destroyed farming areas.

“I collected these beehives, as you can see. I brought them and put them together,” said Dahdouh. “I collected the lids, the boxes, and even the flooring.”

The war with Iran has been draining for all of us in Israel. But when I heard about a high casualty incident – ballistic missile impacts in Arad and Dimona that left nearly 200 people wounded – I drank a cup of coffee, packed a bag, and headed south.

There, I spoke with Shilgit, the head of an after-school program for underprivileged youth. Standing outside her destroyed center, Shilgit said it was a miracle that no children were hurt and spoke about the community coming together in the hours since.

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