Gaza wine: from international brand to punishable crime
As the Christian holidays and New Year’s celebrations draw near and put some in the mood for a glass of wine, how are the preparations looking under Hamas in the Gaza Strip with both Muslims and Christians celebrating these holidays?
While wine has been made in the Gaza Strip for thousands of years, wine and liquor are now illegal under the control of Hamas in Gaza, where a conservative society prevails as it adheres to the teachings of Islamic ideology.
Two months ago, archaeologists discovered a huge industrial area dating back to the Byzantine era and containing a winery that was the largest in the world 1,500 years ago, in what is now the Israeli town of Yavne. Among the discoveries were thousands of pottery jars with the inscription “Gaza wine,” a global brand at the time.
The Gaza Strip used to be known for its wine production. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, one of the world's most-cited multidisciplinary scientific serials, published in 2019 research findings indicating that the commercial production of luxury “Gaza wine” was long assumed to be the economic basis of Late Antiquity settlement in the Negev Desert.
Asked whether wine is currently found in the Gaza Strip, a Muslim Gazan citizen told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, “A few months ago, I attended the wedding of a Christian friend, and I noticed bottles that I had not seen in the markets. At first, I thought they were bottles of barley or soft drink, but when I asked I realized that there were three types of spirits — wine, arak and cognac, and that these enter Gaza through the crossings, where the authorities allow Christians or foreign citizens to bring in a bottle or two."
