Samir Sawafiri pointed at several dozen hungry chickens scavenging for food between the crushed bodies of nearly 65,000 other birds strewn across a destroyed farm in Zeitoun in Gaza City.
“They are all that is left and I have nowhere to put them,” he said. The poultry farms around Zeitoun used to be the Gaza Strip's main provider of eggs, according to Oxfam. Little but twisted metal and crumbling concrete now remains of the poor suburb on the eastern outskirts of Gaza, one of the areas hit hardest during the war.
“I evacuated on January 9,” Mr Sawafiri said. “Three days later, on January 12, tanks came with bulldozers and levelled the fields. They wanted to spoil the economy - that is the only answer. There is no justification for what they did.” Israel says that Zeitoun is a known Hamas stronghold, and that militants used its fields to launch Qassam rockets into Israel.
International aid groups say that while Israel's continuing restrictions on the flow of goods and relief workers into the devastated enclave is hampering emergency efforts, the destruction of Gaza's agriculture means that harvests are likely to fail and the Strip will depend more on handouts.
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