APN update

The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry has now officially confirmed that the Israeli occupation is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. In August 2025, the IPC declared that an “entirely man-made” famine had taken hold. Yet technical proclamations have done little to shift realities on the ground. As the occupation intensifies its ground invasion to seize Gaza City, hundreds of thousands have been displaced southward.

Despite the ongoing blockade, APN remains unwavering in their efforts to revive Gaza’s farmland. Since the project's initiation in March 2024, they have achieved the following milestones:

• Over 1,256 dunums cultivated with fast-growing crops (a further 50 dunums underway)
• 705 farmers supported
• 12,217 individuals supported
• 2,292,285 seedlings planted
• 2,939 kg of seeds distributed
• 6,282,000 kg of vegetables produced
• 28 poultry units
• 36 fishing nets distributed
• 17 greenhouses rehabilitated
• 4 wells rehabilitated
• 757 produce baskets delivered to families to counter price gouging
• 14 community kitchen pots supplied, feeding between 980 to 1,400 people

According to FAO data from July 28, 2025, 2,320 dunums of land remain available for cultivation in Gaza, mostly towards the south. Alongside bringing an end to the genocidal war, APN continue to call for international coordination to commit to the cultivation of remaining arable land and to push for the entry of seeds and essential agricultural inputs.

The silent war in the West Bank is intensifying — marked by the systematic uprooting of trees, aggressive settlement expansion, and the forced displacement of entire communities. In July 2025, the Israeli Knesset voted 71-13 in favor of annexing the West Bank. Come August, the Israeli occupation’s approval of the E1 settlement plan threatens to sever the northern and southern West Bank, rendering a contiguous Palestinian state unviable.

In the face of public proclamations of annexation, the Million Tree Campaign (MTC) stands as a living shield. As such, the campaign slogan, 'They uproot one tree, we plant ten', rings louder than ever. By the end of 2024, APN reached the milestone of planting 3 million fruit trees, and has since embarked on its journey to reach 4 million trees. Key achievements to date include:

• 3,007,806 fruit trees planted
• 34,703 farmers supported
• 147,224 dunums cultivated
• 2,263,120 vegetable seedlings distributed
• 249,171 family members supported
• 57,566 kg of local seeds distributed
• 94 water collection wells, 576 water tanks, and 10,500 meters of water systems installed
• 414 dunums rehabilitated
• 127 greenhouses installed
• 87 sheep provided
• 170 fishing nets provided
• 13,420 birds provided

In 2025, APN continue to plant steadfastness across historic Palestine. In South Bethlehem, farmers harvested grapes and orchard fruits despite decades of settler sabotage and expanding colonial infrastructure. Fruit trees were planted in South Jerusalem in response to ongoing land seizures, while in Nablus, wells were restored to counter the occupation’s engineered water scarcity. In Hebron, where ever-expanding 'firing zones' serve as a precursor to annexation, olive trees were planted in green resistance.

This year also marked the successful completion of APN’s pilot village for the Sumod Project targeting villages facing systematic isolation by settlement networks. Through restoring agricultural infrastructure, providing essential inputs, and conducting training in sustainable farming, the project strengthens self-sufficiency, protects against land confiscation, and reduces reliance on the occupation economy. In this way, APN seeks to reinstate the groundwork for sovereign food systems.

Building on its success in Jordan and Palestine, APN has now expanded its green resistance to the olive groves of Lebanon. On April 25, 2025, APN launched 'Together for Lebanon’s Olives'.

The project seeks to replant the 8,000 dunums of olive farms devastated by Israeli military aggression in Lebanon, while preserving the cultural and ecological heritage embodied by these trees and advancing national food sovereignty. The Head of the Engineers Syndicate outlined the urgent need for replanting, noting that more than 11,000 Lebanese farmers have been impacted by the occupation's latest assaults, with 750 million dollars in agricultural damages and 134,000 hectares — comprising about 80% of Lebanon’s harvest — affected.

APN’s Food Sovereignty Programme seeks to influence agricultural, environmental, and food security policies at national, regional, and international levels. Through a combination of policy analysis, civil society consultations, research, advocacy campaigns, and engagement in technical task forces, the programme channels the voices and needs of communities in pursuit of just and sovereign food systems.

In 2025, APN continues to intensify its pursuit of food sovereignty. At the 'UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) Collaborative Governance Dialogue on Food Security in Protracted Crises' at the World Food Programme headquarters in Rome held in July 2025, APN Chairperson Razan Zuayter gave a powerful intervention. She posed targeted questions that exposed the moral and legal bankruptcy of global leadership in addressing and enforcing accountability for the genocide, ecocide, and weaponisation of food and the environment in Gaza.

Zuayter also stressed the need to confront food insecurity through structural redress, emphasizing the CFS Framework for Action (FFA) as a guiding tool. She called for the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) to be actively disseminated and implemented as a viable framework to ground this change, change that can be actioned even during genocide (seen in the Revive Gaza’s Farmland Project). Some of her key demands read as follows:

During The Gaza Tribunal in May 2025, an independent people’s tribunal committed to ending the Gencoide in Gaza and achieving self-determination for Palestinians, APN’s legal expert presented evidence on the occupation’s ecocide and the weaponisation of starvation as core tools in its ongoing genocide. Violating core principles of international humanitarian and criminal law, she demonstrated how the Israeli occupation has orchestrated starvation — a continuation of its settler colonial policy to destroy indispensable objects of survival, including water infrastructure, ecosystems, arable land, and agricultural inputs, even seeds, as a means to erase the foundations of Palestinian survival and revival.

Through the 'BilAraby' initiative by Qatar Foundation in April 2025, APN also expanded discourse on agriculture as a form of resistance—blending livelihood, cultural identity, and the defense of land against extractive and settler colonial projects.

At the Global Land Forum in Bogotá, Colombia, APN’s Advocacy and Research Officer Lisa Shahin brought the weaponisation of food systems to the fore. She highlighted how land and life-sustaining ecosystems are routinely targeted in contexts of military and colonial occupation as a tool of land-grabbing and displacement. The genocide in Gaza, she stated, illustrates the most extreme manifestation of this. She noted that APN’s ability to center land and resource sovereignty in its work is sustained by its independence from conditional and foreign state funding.

Echoing this dialogue at the Third Arab Land Conference in Morocco (February 2025), APN General Manager Mariam Al Jaajaa challenged the apolitical framing of “land sector innovation.”

She emphasised that land and environmental investments must be grounded in socio-political justice, warning against the use of 'innovation' to legitimise green grabbing. She urged participants to confront the colonial dismantling of Indigenous land tenure systems and the commodification of land as root causes of contemporary challenges. Gaza, again, was central to her address—presented as the culmination of longstanding policies of colonial capitalism.

At a national scale, APN’s work has continued full steam. In June 2025, APN convened over 100 stakeholders—ranging from government officials and private sector actors to farmers, academics, and civil society representatives—for a national consultative session on food sovereignty and the development of Jordan’s agricultural sector. The session fostered a participatory platform for exchanging knowledge, identifying challenges, and proposing actionable solutions. APN’s General Manager contextualised Jordan’s agricultural landscape, examining its policy, economic, and historical dimensions. She called for systemic reforms to unlock the sector’s potential in advancing food sovereignty and sustainable development.

Participants emphasised the need for coordinated policies, secure land and resource access, and targeted support for smallholder farmers—who remain the backbone of Jordan’s food system.

Launched in 2003 by APN, the Green Caravan is a land-centered initiative aimed at supporting small-scale farmers, reversing desertification and working towards Jordan’s food sovereignty. By restoring green cover and defending arable land against fragmentation and accumulation for non-agricultural uses, it confronts environmental and socio-economic challenges at their root.

By the end of 2024, the programme had planted over 234,511 fruit trees—including olive, citrus, grape, and stone fruits—across 6,543 dunums of land. These efforts have directly benefited 11,125 families, or over 59,000 people, boosting agricultural income and strengthening community ties to the land.

Moreover, APN has constructed 62 water harvesting ponds and extended 560 kilometers of irrigation networks, improving water efficiency and agricultural resilience. The project also offsets more than 5 million kilograms of CO₂ annually through large-scale tree planting.

Focusing on regions vital to Jordan’s food system, the Green Caravan supports smallholder and low-income farmers in areas vulnerable to urban expansion and speculative development. Many of these farmers are subject to precarious land tenure arrangements and face structural isolation from social protections, factors that compound agricultural hardship.

The programme also cultivates land stewardship among youth. From Badr to Al-Jizah, students and farmers have planted hundreds of fruit-bearing trees together in 2025 alone. They work side by side to foster generational knowledge transfer, thus empowering the future land stewards of Jordan.

Private and state companies, NGOs and civil society organisations in Jordan and abroad partner with APN to provide financial and logistical support, helping expand restoration efforts across the country. Through these efforts, thousands of trees have taken root this year in the Jordan Valley, Iraq Al-Amir, Al-Jizah, Badr, Al-Amiriyah (Amman), and Na’ima (Irbid).

In every sense, the Green Caravan reflects a collective belief: it takes a community to care for the land — and land to sustain a sovereign food system. Marrying advocacy efforts with practical interventions, APN concluded its Economic Empowerment and Enhancement of Food and Water Security Project in the Jordan Valley in partnership with the International Islamic Charitable Organization – Kuwait in June 2025. The project supported 600 farming families across the northern, central, and southern Jordan Valley with 25,000 fruit trees, 5,000 kilograms of vegetable seeds, and over 716,000 meters of irrigation networks across 375 dunums. It also included the construction and rehabilitation of 80 agricultural ponds and the installation of a solar-powered drying machine in Ghor es-Safi, reducing post-harvest losses and transforming them into added economic value for local communities.