The Gaza Strip is suffering from severe population congestion and a high population growth rate, as well as the rapid decline of arable land in favor of urbanization, which have made the local people struggle to provide enough food for their children. Therefore, the food security of these families is threatened and very vulnerable just like their economic situation. 

This prompted some civil society institutions to implement projects that will help keep Gaza's green vegetative color that face the dilemma of how to balance the need for more homes with the need for food. Ma'an Development Center is implementing a project called "Humanitarian Response to Food and Water Needs in the Gaza Strip", which aims to transform the rooftops of houses into areas for agriculture through the deployment of urban agricultural units on the rooftops of a number of enterprises and houses to produce agricultural crops for local consumption.

Tarek Abdel Ati, an agronomist who oversees the urban agriculture project at Ma'an Center, explained to the CGTN how this project will contribute to enhancing food security for poor families.

"The initiative was to support families whose children are malnourished in order to help them provide food security. In light of the ever-increasing population and lack of agricultural areas, we have considered using underutilized roofs of homes to enhance arable spaces," said him. 

Around 68 percent of households in the Gaza Strip, about 1.3 million people, suffer from acute or moderate food insecurity, according to the latest issue of the Palestinian Central Statistics Bureau's Social, Economic and Food Security Survey. Nevertheless, 70 percent of households in Gaza indicated that they receive some form of food aid.  

Sa'id Abu Nasser is one of the beneficiaries of rooftop-planting projects in Gaza who learned the techniques of urban agriculture through training provided by the Food and Agriculture Organization. Sa'id explained to CGTN during an interview how he became self-sufficient in vegetables for his family.

"I started home farming right after the training. I started growing two types of vegetables and then I developed the project till I am growing many kinds of vegetables that we need at home until I achieved my family's self-sufficiency," he said. 

As part of their struggle to provide food baskets for their families, some residents of Gaza learned the techniques of planting rooftops themselves without benefiting from any projects due to the lack of land available for agriculture. One of those is the young Rafik Zweidi, who focused on growing citrus trees on the roof of his house spoke to the CGTN when wandering around his farm on the roof of his house.

"In the meantime, we have a shortage of citrus trees after we had large areas of them, I thought about looking for an alternative to make up for the shortage of agricultural land, I used my rooftop to grow citrus trees with modest possibilities as you see, and now I get more than 80 percent of our needs in this way".  

Recently, the UN's World Food Program (WFP) in Palestine expanded its assistance to 12,000 new beneficiaries in the Gaza Strip, bringing the number of recipients of food support to more than 220,000 who are living in extreme poverty and suffering from severe food insecurity. The WFP announced that this increase is aimed at leaving no one behind and aimed at achieving the goal of sustainably ending hunger in Palestine by 2030.