Like in many places around the world, COVID-19 has many negative economic implications in Palestine. Palestinians living in remote areas are especially endangered when it comes to food security. Masafer Yatta is such an area of a collection of 19 Palestinian villages, located between 14 and 24 kilometers south of the city of Hebron within the municipal boundary of Yatta.
Since 1967, Masafer Yatta has been under Israeli occupation. It is located in "Area C", where Israel has full military and civil control. The area is used by the Israeli army for military training. More than one thousand Palestinians risk being expelled from their homes and properties. For all those years the villagers continued to live in their expanding communities and to cultivate their land, yet the constant threat of demolition, expulsion and expropriation by surrounding settlements left more and more agricultural land unused . Hence, we chose this area for our project in order to cultivate and plant these “abandoned” lands and prevent the expansion of the settlements beside it.
In addition to various other immediate response programs such as the Food Parcels Project and the PPE-Project, Taghyeer has implemented the first agricultural project to enable the community of Masafer Yatta to self-subsidence in the peak time of the pandemic. Moreover, the community deepened its relationship with our MoC's and took initiative to live a model of self-responsibility.
Together with our partner, Hebron International Resource Network (HIRN), we managed to cultivate 2.8 hectares of land that were offered by the local council. From April 2020 - July 2020, our activists and the local people were able to plant seven different kinds of seedlings and harvest the crops. Thus, 85 families were provided with food.
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