Asmaa Abu Mezied is an economic development and social inclusion specialist working to address issues of gender, development, and climate change in the agriculture sector. Her research interests focus on the care economy, women’s collectives organizing in economic sectors, the private sector’s social accountability, and the intersection of Palestinian political, agricultural, and environmental identities. She served as Al-Shabaka’s 2022 Visiting Gaza Fellow and was previously an Atlas Corps Fellow in partnership with President Obama Emerging Global Leaders, a Gaza Hub-Global Shaper (an initiative of World Economic Forum), and a 2021 Mozilla Foundation Wrangler at “Tech for Social Activism” space.
From this author
When four donkeys were evacuated from Gaza to a German zoo in November 2025, their rescue was celebrated as a humanitarian success. Yet while the animals were transported to safety, given new names, and described as leaving behind "hunger and misery, beatings and hardship," Palestinian children have been unable to evacuate amid a relentless ongoing genocide.
In this commentary, Asmaa Abu Mezied examines how humanitarian concern operates through racialized hierarchies of grievability that render animal suffering more visible and rescue-worthy than Palestinian human life. She further argues that animal welfare interventions are materially entangled with the dispossession of Palestinian survival infrastructure, showing how it can become an enabling mechanism of colonial violence rather than its interruption.
Palestinians in Gaza are suffering from a worsening energy crisis due to the Israeli regime’s ongoing siege. As a result, they have adopted different coping strategies, including solar energy technology to offset electricity shortages. Al-Shabaka policy analyst and 2022 Visiting Gaza Fellow Asmaa Abu Mezied examines this reality, and offers recommendations for Palestinian leadership and stakeholders to promote Palestinian economic self-determination in Gaza.
Asmaa Abu Mezied joins host Yara Hawari to discuss the energy crisis in Gaza, situating it within the context of the Israeli regime’s unrelenting blockade and repeated attacks on the besieged enclave. Abu Mezied also explains how the international community is complicit in maintaining this unlivable status quo.
In 2013, the UNDP warned of the increasing occurrence of dangerous heatwaves in Palestine over the coming years as a result of climate change. Indeed, at the end of August 2020, the Palestine Meteorological Office issued a warning about an impending heatwave, where the temperature ranged between five to nine degrees above its yearly average.
