Israeli settlers, who are becoming more powerful by the year and have established terrorist factions known as Price-Tag for such acts, initiated their customary yearly war on the olive harvest season. They launched their habitual attacks on the helpless Palestinian people in villages close to the settlements in the north and south of the West Bank, vying to spoil what many Palestinians consider an occasion for national celebration and reaping profit.
Palestinian Liberation Organization’s National Office for the Defense of Land and Resistance to Settlement issued a report condemning gangs of settlers and occupation forces for exploiting the yearly international solidarity campaigns’ absence as a result of the coronavirus pandemic to burn Palestinian farmers’ trees to prevent them from accessing their land, attack them, steal olives and flood olive tree fields with sewage.
This year’s harvest season began with “settlers setting fire to old olive trees in the village of Safa, west of Ramallah, by throwing Molotov cocktails, which ignited large fires, destroying hundreds of olive trees, in Wadi Al-Malaki, Al-Kursana, Batin Hariz, and Batin Al-Hump.
“The fires went on for more than 3 hours, as the occupation authorities colluded with the settlers, preventing the residents and owners of land lying behind the annexation wall from reaching it to put out the fire and salvage their trees.”
In Hebron, a group of settlers chopped dozens of olive trees near the Mitzpe Yair settlement, east of Yatta in southern Hebron. In Huwara, south of Nablus, six volunteers suffered various injuries after being attacked by more than 30 settlers from Yitzhar while picking olives in the Jabal Al-Lahef area on the first day of the Fazaa Zaitoun campaign to support landowners during the olive season.
Unsatisfied, they also set fire to several olive trees before leaving and launched several over attacks. Settlers from the nearby settlement of Lashim, for example, torched an olive grove in the town of Deir Ballut in western Salfit, burning tens of olive trees.
The setters take advantage of their proximity to most of the villages where the Palestinian olive trees that bear some of the world’s finest olives are planted, as the Israeli occupation army controls these areas. They are spurred on by the sermons of rabies, like Mordechai Eliyahu, who claims that “This land (Judea and Samaria/ the West Bank) belongs to the people of Israel and if gentiles plant on this land, both the tree and the fruit it yields is ours, because they the land belongs to us, not them.”
Murad Shteiwi, director of the PLO’s National Office for the Defense of Land and Resistance to Settlement, says: “The Israeli occupation authorities’ designation of 130 zones in the West Bank as closed military zones damages the olive season and farmers’ access to their land."
In an interview with Voice of Palestine radio on Saturday, he called on volunteers to organize to help farmers on the groves threatened by settlements and document the attacks.
Some olive trees are thousands of years old, and while there are no official estimates of the number of olive trees in Palestine, researchers estimate them at around one million trees.
Olive cultivation yields between and 15 and 30 tons a year.
