Israeli forces threaten, attack Palestinian farmers harvesting olives in West Bank

Israeli occupation forces attacked Palestinian farmers harvesting olives in the village of Qusra, south of Nablus, in the northern occupied West Bank, early this morning.

According to the Wafa news agency, Israeli soldiers, along with a guard from the nearby illegal Magdilim settlement, raided the northern part of Qusra, where they threatened Palestinian farmers with weapons, forced them to cease harvesting olives and demanded that they vacate their lands.

The olive-picking season in the West Bank this year has been marked by frequent attacks from Israeli forces and settlers, including violence such as killings, arson of olive trees, crop theft and blocking farmers from reaching their land.

These assaults by the occupation forces come after Israel’s far-right National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, urged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to cancel the olive harvest season in the West Bank.

Many Palestinian farming families have been cultivating olive trees for decades, even centuries and depend on the olive harvest for their livelihood. “Approximately one million olive trees, many of which were centuries old, have been uprooted by Israel since 1967,” Saad Dagher, a Palestinian agronomist in the occupied West Bank, told journalist Carolina S Pedrazzi, last year.

“They don’t only uproot them on the pretext that they need to make space for settlements or other Occupation infrastructure. They also claim that the olive trees represent ‘security threats’ towards Israelis, as trees are posts behind which Palestinians hide to target soldiers. It’s madness.”

According to the Palestinian Authority’s Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission, there have been 239 reported incidents of violence against olive harvesters by Israeli forces and settlers as of 29 October. These include 109 cases where farmers were prevented from accessing their fields.

Watch: Gaza’s olive season crippled by Israel’s war