“Agriculture wasn’t just collateral damage, as the general narrative goes. It was a deliberate target”

Photos: Menachem Kalish, Keren Hashviis, Pivot Group

The destruction of agriculture in the western Negev and beyond wasn’t merely collateral damage from Hamas’s murderous rampage through the Gaza Envelope. That rampage was a targeted assault to cause economic ruin to a country that not only relies on its own agriculture, but that’s also been at the forefront of innovative techniques to help feed the world. For farmers around Israel facing collapse, assistance has come from a surprising source

There is an untold backtory to the gruesome Hamas massacre last Simchas Torah, tied into an agenda that went beyond their savage rampage of kidnapping, torture, violation and murder. Hamas was out to destroy the entire agricultural infrastructure of the western Negev and hoped that would cause an economic collapse. It was agricultural terrorism at its best, or worst.

We all know by now just how fiendish the Hamas attackers were, based on their very own documentation of the rampage. They wanted Israelis, and Jews the world over, to witness their savagery in all its grisly detail — to contemplate the psychological cruelty of children forced to watch their parents murdered before their eyes and vice versa, of women treated without a flicker of humanity. It was a systematic attempt to terrify the objects of their hatred so that the latter would give up and run away, abandoning their land.

But that wasn’t all. Their actions were carefully planned in order to inflict the greatest possible damage, physically, emotionally, and economically. The terrorists had complete plans of each agricultural kibbutz or moshav that they invaded, and therefore knew how to shut down the systems at their source. Those infrastructure plans were meticulously gathered by the thousands of Gaza residents who passed through the various border crossings every day to work on the Jewish settlements — treated as friends by their employers who would have coffee with them, help their families with medical care, and buy presents for their children.

“Agriculture wasn’t just collateral damage, as the general narrative goes. It was a deliberate target,” according to Moran Freibach, the head of agriculture in Nahal Oz, one of the 32 agricultural communities of the Eshkol Region that produce 70 percent of Israel’s vegetables, 20 percent of its fruit, and six percent of its milk.

Freibach described to a generally complacent media how it wasn’t simply wanton destruction: The terrorists systematically targeted farmlands, livestock, irrigation systems, and other infrastructure, as they moved through the western Negev. While some media outlets, including the Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, and Wall Street Journal picked up the story, it’s been largely ignored and generally unknown in the public sphere.

In Freibach’s community of Nachal Oz, all 40 irrigation control boxes were smashed and the terrorists went straight for the customized computer chips that regulate the entire system; every farm vehicle was either burned or taken into Gaza.