With a chainsaw in his car, Ahmed Abdelal tours the Gaza Strip, asking around for people wanting to cut down trees, regrow orchards or make way for construction.
One of the few remaining woodcutters in the Palestinian territory, Abdelal, who learned woodcutting from his father, is struggling to scratch out a living in a traditional job that is less and less in demand.
Job opportunities are rare in this Palestinian enclave wedged between Israel and Egypt next to the Mediterranean Sea, and so are green spaces.
Photo: AP
Rapid population growth — more than 2 million people are crammed in a 360km2 strip — comes at the expense of arable land.
Israel maintains a 300m wide buffer zone along its frontier with Gaza. At the height of the second Palestinian uprising in the early 2000s, its military bulldozers leveled large swaths of citrus groves in the border areas.
Over the past few years, Gaza has suffered under a blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt after the Islamic militant Hamas group seized control of the territory from the Palestinian Authority in 2007.
Israel says the restrictions are needed to prevent Hamas from upgrading its weapons.
The Palestinian Authority holds sway in the West Bank.
The blockade and the rift between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have weakened Gaza’s energy sector. As a result, residents are put on a rotating electricity schedule of eight hours on, followed by an eight-hour blackout.
Here, woodcutters like Abdelal find an opportunity.
The unreliability of the power supply drives up demand for wood in winter.
Abdelal and other Gaza woodcutters look to expand their clientele from the traditional buyers of logs, residents of rural areas who bake bread on wood-fire ovens and tribal councils who keep the Arabic coffee pots warm near a wood fire.
Among Abdelal’s favorite clients are small kitchens that cook food in ovens dug under the ground. In these pits, the wood is burnt to coal before chicken, lamb shoulders and shanks are tossed in and left to cook for hours. The cooking technique is becoming popular.
The olive and citrus wood logs also go to a burning site in east Gaza City where they are turned into charcoal.
Abu Ashraf al-Hattab, who has been a charcoal burner for decades, said the business has declined in the past few years because the local supplies of wood have shrunk and people have turned to cheaper, imported charcoal.
In his gift shop, Muhanad Ahmed wanted to offer environmentally friendly items and drop the excessive amount of plastic that is seen on the shelves of other shops, he said.
He buys logs and shapes them into wood sculptures.
Abdelal said that as long as he can find customers, he would continue.
“Cutting the wood is an old profession for us, and despite development and modernity, it still exists,” he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing