Farmers in the Gaza Strip once tended eggplants, peppers and tomatoes in modest plots squeezed between the territory’s urban sprawl and the watchtowers of the Israeli border wall.

But after more than a year of war, the farms are in ruins, their fields damaged by tanks and troop movements, their equipment destroyed and many farmers killed.

In Beit Lahia, once a relatively verdant area in northern Gaza in which neighbors worked together to grow food, Yousef Saqer, 24, surveyed the land where his greenhouses and irrigation systems once stood.

“That is all gone now,” he said recently, shortly before Israel began another deadly offensive in the area targeting what it has described as a regrouped Hamas presence. “The tanks destroyed all of it.”

“We used to use machines and tractors and now we are back to digging with hoes, forks and shovels,” he said. “We went back to the old ways of doing everything.”