Oren Barnea, secretary of the Vegetable Growers Association and a member of Saad's first response team, warned on Sunday, in an interview on the Kalman Lieberman program on Kan Reshet Bet, of irreversible damage caused to the agriculture around the Gaza Strip, and told how Hamas terrorists were engaged in destroying agriculture on the morning of October 7.
"We are at war and I understand that this war has had another aspect," said Barnea. "We are currently in a situation where if we do not take immediate action in next few days, there may be irreversible damage. We have to make 'online' decisions, whether to sow potatoes or not. One-third of Israel's potatoes are grown here."
He added that "Hamas actually wiped out the local agriculture. You may not know this, but there were groups of terrorists going over the faucet lines, destroying all the water pipes, thrashing the fertilizer tanks, setting fire to buildings, and irrigation pools, and destroying the infrastructure of the local agriculture."
"There were terrorists that sprayed gasoline on chicken coops and others that lit them. They were busy destroying our agriculture," Barnea concluded.