WHEAT AND WEDDINGS

 
With the ongoing war and blockade hampering all public facilities and infrastructure, Gazan families and communities have had to develop infrastructures of solidarity, such as food shares, collective harvests, and communal daycares and elderly care systems. Festivities have also taken on outsize importance. Weddings are one-week celebrations, with three days set aside for the family of the groom to offer drinks and sweets to the village men and boys, and three days slated for the women’s celebration. On the seventh day, usually a Friday, the full nuclear family joins together in one bigger party, which takes place on the wheat field, and which the entire community sets up and prepares for cooperatively. Though most farmland in
the area is used for rotating seasonal cultivation, farmers keep these fields fallow through the summer to prepare for gatherings.


Image source: Middle East Monitor web news




Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory, 2021