Screenshot of video shared by the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), showing the destruction of the seed bank. Fair use.
On July 31, 2025, Israeli forces bulldozed the seed‑multiplication unit of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC’s) seed bank in Hebron. Built from the ground up beginning in 2010, the unit had served as the only seed bank in the West Bank, safeguarding over 70 varieties of indigenous heirloom seeds, many of which no longer exist elsewhere in Palestine, according to Fouad Abu Saif, UAWC’s director general.
According to a press release by the UAWC, the devastation was swift and unannounced, with bulldozers and heavy machinery reducing into ruins the tools, propagation materials, and infrastructure essential to food sovereignty, constituting “a direct blow to Palestinian efforts to preserve local biodiversity and ensure food sovereignty.”
A video showing what happened was shared on Facebook:
With this act, not just a facility, but a living archive of Palestinian agricultural memory and cultural heritage — the result of generations of seed saving and ecological knowledge — was destroyed.
Erasure through agriculture
Seed banks are not neutral repositories: they carry the DNA of memory and of resistance. Vivien Sansour’s Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, based in the diaspora, intentionally framed seed saving as political resistance — a means to preserve not just biodiversity but heritage in the face of erasure. She described seeds as a “map to say: Look, this is who we are, this is who we were, and this is who we’ve been.”
Within occupied Palestine, seed saving is inseparable from resistance. Israeli policies have dismantled farmland, restricted access to fields, uprooted olive groves, and bombarded Gaza’s Baladi seed bank in Al‑Qarara — demolishing its store of native wheat, spinach, and barley, and displacing farming families, who have tried to rebuild from scratch.
800,000 Olive Trees Uprooted, 33 Central Parks. Infographic by Visualizing Palestine. CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.
The latest attack on the Hebron seed facility reinforces that pattern: eradicating the ecological and generational links between Palestinians and their land.
The targeting of seed systems is part of a broader strategy of cultural genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide — erasing not just people but modes of knowing, growing, and being. UN and nonprofit investigators have characterized damage to archives, mosques, universities, and farmland in Gaza as acts of systematic cultural destruction and a crime of extermination, and part of an ongoing genocide that has been found plausible by the ICJ.
Seeds as targets of genocide
This is not a standalone incident. The destruction of food sovereignty has precedent in colonial and genocidal contexts: In the US colonial expansion, Native American agricultural systems and buffalo populations were systematically destroyed to force dependence and starvation. In her book, “An Indigenous People’s History of the United States,” Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz writes that:
In an effort to create Indigenous economic dependency and compliance in land transfers, the US policy directed the army to destroy the basic economic base of the Plains Nations—the buffalo. The buffalo were killed to near extinction, tens of millions dead within a few decades and only a few hundred left by the 1880s.
More recently, with the 2003 Iraq invasion, the country’s national seed bank in Abu Ghraib was destroyed by US bombing and then looted “which led to the loss of Iraq’s thousand-year-old seed varieties.” A year later, the Coalition Provisional Authority issued Order 81 — amending state seed law to prohibit farmers from saving or replanting seeds, enforce corporate patents, and import Western hybrid and GMO seeds. By 2005, Iraq could produce only 4 percent of its own seed supply, locking farmers into corporate dependence and dismantling millennia of Mesopotamian seed sovereignty.
A group of Iraqi scientists salvaged whatever seeds they could and drove them to safety across the border to Syria’s International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) seed bank in Aleppo, one of the oldest in the region. But a few years later, the Syrian seed bank, carrying over 150,000 seed accessions and deeply tied to local agricultural knowledge — declined in function as the civil war intensified in the country after 2011. Staff were compelled to evacuate and ship approximately 80 percent of the collection to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as well as to Lebanon and Morocco.
Seeds, sovereignty, and the politics of erasure
Heirloom seeds capture biological diversity, memory, adaptation, and ancestral stories. They are built by communities over centuries to thrive in particular climates — and they are reservoirs of resilience. Destroying them, therefore, is not collateral: it’s a strategic method of biological warfare — denying communities the capacity to survive and to define their own future.
International civil society echoed that condemnation. La Via Campesina condemned the assault as did Friends of the Earth International. The Irish Green Party described the demolition as “the final piece of the genocide jigsaw,” urging war crimes investigations at the ICJ.
International law recognizes destruction of cultural heritage and civilian infrastructure essential to survival as potential war crimes. Under the Rome Statute, such acts — if widespread and systematic — can qualify as crimes against humanity or genocide. Yet few governments or institutions have responded forcefully to the seed‑bank’s destruction or any other war crimes committed by Israel.
The intentional razing of the Hebron seed‑multiplication unit is another strike in a broader campaign to erase Palestinians’ capacity to sustain memory, culture, and life. By targeting seeds, Israel isn’t merely destroying food systems, it is severing the ties between generations, lands, stories, and identity.
