Seeds as a Casualty of War
We save seeds to ensure our future and to connect to our past. For these same reasons, seed banks are often targeted in war. The destruction of local seeds cuts communities off not only from food sovereignty, but also from vital heritage and ancestry.
On July 31, 2025, the Israeli military bulldozed storage facilities at the Hebron seed bank in the West Bank. Founded in 2003 by the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), the seed bank preserved heirloom seeds gathered by farmers in the West Bank and Gaza, with a focus on local strains especially resistant to disease and tolerant of harsh weather. Generations of biological diversity, adaptation and ancestral memory were leveled in less than an hour.
According to a statement from the UAWC, “The destruction was carried out without warning, under military protection. Destroying a national seed bank is an act of erasure, intended to sever the generational ties between farmers and their land.”
In October 2024, before Israel attacked its seed bank, UAWC submitted 23 Palestinian seed varieties to Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway. While storage in the vault prevents the seed from disappearing entirely, it’s an imperfect solution. Locked away, the seeds are no longer in relationship with their stewards and are not being grown out and adapted to our ever-changing climate.
Destroying seed banks and engineering famine as war tactics are all too common in recent history. In 2023, rebel forces ransacked Sudan’s seed bank, scattering seeds and samples. In 2022, a Russian bomb attack on the city of Kharkiv destroyed tens of thousands of seed samples from Ukraine’s national seed collection. In 2003, the United States bombed the Iraqi National Seed Bank in Abu Ghraib, destroying many thousand-year-old seed varieties.
In 1941, when Nazi forces took Leningrad in a 28-month siege, Russian botanists at the Plant Institute—the world’s first seed bank—locked themselves in the building to guard the seed collection. A dozen of these scientists starved to death instead of eating the seeds. They were thinking beyond themselves, to thousands of years of unbroken lineages of these seeds, and to a future beyond war when these seeds could be planted again. (We recommend reading the excellent 2024 article in The Guardian, “The inspiring scientists who saved the world’s first seed bank.”)
These wrenching stories are reminders of how precious seeds are and how essential the work of seed saving is. Even in the face of violence and occupation, people have always and will always find ways to protect their seeds.
Two hopeful seed-saving efforts that have cropped up in the U.S. in recent years are the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library (phsl-website.webflow.io/) and Iraqi Seed Collective. These networks of growers are committed to preserving, growing and sharing seeds from these regions, and both have been successful in getting seed in the hands of people in the diaspora, seeds that might have otherwise been lost.
