Violence has increased across the occupied West Bank as Palestinian farmers try to harvest their olive trees before the end of the season, in the face of a concerted campaign of harassment by groups of armed and aggressive Israeli settlers.
Dozens of new incidents have occurred in recent days across much of the occupied territory as settlers step up a broader effort to intimidate and harm Palestinian communities.
“It’s really bad at the moment. The settlers are operating with total impunity,” said Aviv Tatarsky, an Israeli activist who has worked in the West Bank for decades.
Early on Sunday, settlers vandalised cars on the outskirts of the town of Sinjil and “raided” farmland near the village of Mughayyir, according to local reports. On Saturday, a farmer was assaulted and his crops damaged by settlers in the town of Beit Furik, east of Nablus.
Attacks by settlers on the West Bank have increased since the US-brokered deal stopped the war in Gaza almost six weeks ago after two years of devastating conflict. The UN logged more than 260 attacks resulting in Palestinian casualties or damage to property in the West Bank in October alone – the highest monthly count since they began monitoring in 2006.
Records kept by the Palestinian Farmers’ Union (PFU) show incidents of violence against its members up fourfold, from three or four daily before the war in Gaza. The most recent attacks are “not random, but deliberate efforts to undermine Palestinian rural life”, the PFU said in a statement last month.
Last week, settlers were reported to have assaulted agricultural workers and olive pickers in the town of Beit Duqqu, near Jerusalem, prevented Palestinians from plowing their land in al-Farisiyah in the northern Jordan valley, burned olive trees belonging to local Palestinians outside two villages near the city of Qalqilya and attacked farmers near Aqraba.
Another attack by settlers targeted the village of Beit Lid, where a light industrial park was ransacked and 10 vehicles were torched. Four Palestinians were injured during the assault by dozens of masked settlers, who also attacked Israeli soldiers after they arrived to restore order.
In Beit Lid, Mahmoud Edeis said he wanted merely “to feel that my children are safe, that when I go to sleep I can say: ‘OK, there’s nothing [to worry about].
“But at any moment something could happen … This can’t go on. It can’t be that we keep living our whole lives in a state of fear and danger.”
In Deir Istiya, a small town in the West Bank where there have been multiple clashes between settlers and Palestinian farmers, a mosque had been defaced and torched. The violence in Beit Lid prompted the president of Israel, Isaac Herzog, to condemn what he called a “shocking and serious” attack that “crosses a red line”.
On Sunday, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, blamed a “minority” that “does not represent the large settler public, who are law-abiding and loyal to the state” for violence which “will be addressed with full force because we are a state of law and a state of law operates according to the law”.
Criticism by top Israeli officials of violence by settlers and their supporters is extremely rare. Palestinians and human rights campaigners say Israeli authorities make little effort to control settlers in the West Bank, with only one in 20 investigations opened into settler violence ending with charges and even fewer leading to convictions. Three of the four Israeli suspects arrested over the Beit Lid attacks were released, local media reported.
There has also been a rise in violence involving the Israeli military. Palestinian health officials said on Sunday that a 19-year-old Palestinian man was killed by Israeli military fire near Nablus, the seventh person to be killed in the West Bank in the past two weeks by Israeli fire. The Israeli military said the man hurled an explosive device at the soldiers, who fired in response and killed him.
In addition to Sunday’s clashes, the Palestinian health ministry in the West Bank said six teenagers – aged 15 to 17 – were shot and killed by Israeli fire in four separate incidents over the past two weeks. The total number of Palestinians killed by Israeli security forces and settlers since 7 October 2023 in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, is now well over 1,000. One in five of the victims is a child including more than 200 boys and seven girls. The number also includes 20 women and at least seven people with disabilities.
On Friday, Israeli authorities stopped hundreds of Israeli activists and volunteers from reaching the village of Burin, where they were to assist Palestinians with their olive harvest.
Authorities have repeatedly blocked such efforts. Hanna Uihlein, a UK-based volunteer, was among a group of more than 30 volunteers from Europe and the US who were held in prison for between 36 hours and five days by Israeli authorities after being detained near Nablus last month. All were eventually deported, accused of violating the conditions of their tourist visas.
“We were there to observe and protect … We were treated as criminals and the whole experience was dehumanising. It was also very clear from the beginning that it was strategic – to intimidate, deter and prevent any form of solidarity with Palestinian farmers,” she said.
The revenue from olives in the West Bank is now a fraction of the $130m (£99m) that it was annually before the war, compounding a deep economic crisis. About 110,000 farmers in the West Bank directly profit from the olive harvest with another 50,000 people earning much of their livelihood from working with the trees and produce.
Many ministers in Israel’s ruling coalition, the most rightwing government in the country’s history, have close ideological and organisational ties with settler activists, including some of the most extreme, and frequently offer vocal support. Bezalel Smotrich, the finance minister, lives in a settlement and called in September for Israel to annex “roughly 82% of the West Bank”.
Home to 2.7 million Palestinians, the territory has long been central to plans for a future Palestinian state, but successive Israeli governments have expanded existing settlements and allowed or encouraged new ones. The settlements are considered illegal under international law. The West Bank has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 six-day war.
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