Palestine weekly: Olive harvest opens under assault

Israeli settlers and forces beat Palestinians, set property on fire and steal crops across the occupied West Bank.

While olive picking season is yet to officially begin, Palestinians began early efforts to reach their groves this week – and so did the Israeli settlers.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israeli strikes continued to ignore a year-old “ceasefire” as the territory’s humanitarian and medical systems slid further towards collapse, with winter around the corner.

The week’s violence suggests a bloody olive harvest to come in the occupied West Bank. On October 3 in Jabal Qamas, between the towns of Osarin and Beita south of Nablus, settlers from the illegal Mevaser Shalom outpost attacked a family of harvesters. The pogrom left one man, Hussam Adily, in critical condition, and injured his brother and mother, according to Israeli activist Jonathan Pollack and Arabic-language media reports.

Similar pogroms on Palestinian olive pickers occurred across the north and centre of the West Bank, including in the villages of Rantis, Sebastia, Beit Imrin, Deir Sharaf, Aqraba, az-Zawiya, Ramin and Arrabuna. Farmers were pepper-sprayed, run over, or struck with sticks and fists, with several requiring hospital treatment, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa and local field reports.

In Beita’s Jabal al-Arma, Israeli settlers opened fire on pickers and forces lobbed tear gas directly at them.

Trees were targeted, too. Near Abu Dis, settlers torched roughly 55 olive trees, along with a family’s freshly picked harvest, according to Wafa. Elsewhere, settlers drove their flocks through Palestinian-owned groves, ruining crops in villages including Burqa, al-Mughayyir and Beit Duqqu, according to local field reports.

In Beita, the Israeli army halted a harvest after settlers showed up. The incident was the fourth such shutdown that weekend, Haaretz reported, in an area beyond the army’s jurisdiction. Soldiers forced out international volunteers accompanying Palestinians at gunpoint and assaulted journalists covering the attack.

Bahaa al-Natsheh, 19, was shot dead the next day near an illegal outpost outside Kobar, according to Wafa and other media reports. Israeli authorities are still withholding his body from his family.

After weeks of increasingly bellicose campaign rhetoric, Israeli institutions this week moved to check some of the governing coalition’s ambitions ahead of the October 27 election.