Olive harvest opens under assault: settlers and soldiers turn the West Bank's harvest season into a battlefield

Every October, Palestinian farmers walk into their olive groves for the harvest that sustains more than 80,000 households. And every October, the attacks intensify. This year's season has opened as a campaign of violence: according to the Ramallah-based Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, Israeli forces and settlers have carried out 259 attacks on Palestinian olive farmers since this year's harvest began. The weekend of October 3 and 4 was the bloodiest stretch. In Jamma'in and surrounding villages, settlers accompanied by soldiers attacked farmers harvesting olives, injuring three people in Jamma'in alone while stones were thrown and trees vandalised and dozens detained. In Beita, around 50 masked settlers descended on olive pickers, throwing stones and attacking a house; soldiers then rounded up the Palestinians and international activists who were harvesting, sat them on the ground at gunpoint and forced them to leave. Al Jazeera footage captured settlers smashing a Palestinian vehicle in Osarin. In the Jabal Qamass area of Beita, Israeli forces detained and assaulted journalists covering the clashes. In one reported exchange quoted by Haaretz, soldiers told Palestinian landowners they could not harvest their own land "until all the anarchist Jews leave here," referring to Israeli activists standing with the farmers. Then came Kafr Qaddum. On October 4, settlers attacked Palestinian farmers tending their groves in the village east of Qalqilya. Hikmat Mahmoud Shtiwi, 49, and Wissam Ayoub Shtiwi, 45, were severely wounded and transferred to hospital. Israeli forces then stormed the village, set up checkpoints at its entrance and blocked farmers and labourers from reaching their lands. The pattern repeated in Aqrsin, Burqa and Masafer Yatta across October 5 and 6: vehicles burned, a home torched, residents beaten. This is not a series of incidents. It is a season. In September alone, the Wall and Settlement Resistance Commission recorded 2,051 attacks across the West Bank, 1,404 attributed to Israeli forces and 647 to settler groups. On October 1, 51-year-old Mashhour Yassin was shot dead by settlers at his doorstep in Yasuf, east of Salfit, when attackers from a nearby outpost opened fire. Thirty Palestinians have been killed by settlers since the start of 2026, more than in any year since 2022. Since October 2023, Israelis have killed 1,212 Palestinians in the West Bank, including 254 children, most by soldiers and more than a quarter by settlers. As the harvest began, Israel deported four international solidarity activists who had come to stand with the farmers. The olive tree is livelihood, culture and title deed in one. That is precisely why the groves are attacked: to make the land unworkable and the farmer unwelcome on it. Every tree burned, every picker beaten, every roadblock at a village entrance is a message that the harvest itself is the target. The farmers keep walking into the groves anyway.