APN | Palestine

8 September 2024

APN has successfully completed the "Roots of Blessings" project in Palestine, funded by the Palestine Support Society-Bahrain, and overseen by Kaaf Humanitarian Foundation. This project is part of APN’s broader efforts to bolster the steadfastness and economic empowerment of Palestinian farmers and to counteract the systematic colonial policies and tactics to confiscate Palestinian lands.

Launched in February, the project has led to the cultivation of 145 dunams (35.8 acres) of Palestinian land with 5,570 local olive, stone fruits, grape, citrus, and palm trees. This was accomplished in collaboration with 28 farmers who support more than 245 people, and created about 140 job opportunities.

Congruent with the project’s rehabilitation goals, the crops were planted on agricultural lands damaged by the apartheid wall, settlement expansion, or bypass roads. The project aimed to support Palestine’s agricultural sector, improve food security for families, promote self-sufficiency in certain crops, and economically empower farmers by providing job opportunities and additional income sources. Furthermore, the plants serve to protect lands from confiscation and reduce environmental degradation caused by the uprooting of trees.

It is worth noting that the “Trees of Blessings” project is part of APN’s Million Tree Campaign, launched in 2001 under the slogan “They uproot one, we plant ten”. The campaign has planted approximately 3 million fruit trees in Palestine.

APN General Manager, Mariam Al Jaajaa, highlighted the programme’s significance given the Israeli occupation’s deliberate confiscation of uncultivated agricultural lands and its systematic targeting of the Palestinian agricultural sector. The programme also aims to tackle high rates of food insecurity and unemployment in Palestine, while addressing the limited contribution of Arab and Islamic capital to environmental and agricultural funding. Al Jaajaa stressed the urgent need for farmers to access productive resources to sustain their projects.

Al Jaajaa indicated that the number of trees uprooted by the Israeli occupation between 2000 and 2021 exceeded 3,232,375 million trees, most of which were olive and citrus trees.