2024 Olive Harvest: under constant, even deadly attack
JVL Introduction
Olives are of huge cultural and, of course, economic importance for Palestinians. The 2024 harvest has come under unprecedented levels of attack from soldiers and settlers. This is nothing new but this year those attacks have been so extreme that some farmers have been completely unable to access their land or, when finally given permission to do so, found that their trees have already been harvested by settlers. One Palestinian woman , Hanan Abu Salama, was killed by soldiers in the north of the West Bank while trying to harvest the family’s olives and another, Israeli activist Zoria Haddad, was viciously attacked by a settler a she was with Palestinians in the southern West Bank.
Jason Burke argued in The Guardian that settler intimidation of West Bank farmers is about far more than the olive harvest . His piece also reports on the death of Hanan Abu Salama and outlines other attacks including this summary: “Between 1 October and 25 November, the UN documented 250 settler-related incidents across 88 West Bank communities, with 57 Palestinians injured by settlers and 11 by Israeli forces. More than 2,800 trees –mostly slow-growing olive trees – were burned, sawed-off, or vandalised, and there was significant theft of crops and harvesting tools,”.
Even the horrors continuing apace in Gaza are now garnering less coverage in the mainstream media (after all it is no longer “new[s]”) but what is what is happening in the West Bank is covered even less. It is important that we remember and share information about both areas.
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This article was originally published by +972 Magazine on Thu 12 Dec 2024. Read the original here.
I lost my wife and my land’: A deadly olive harvest season ends in the West Bank
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Why are so many decent people referring to genocidal, colonial Zionist terrorists as “settlers’? Palestine is already-settled.
These events of intimidation, theft and violence against indigenous people on their own land are disgusting. They are also a part of the genocide of the indigenous people by the terrorist state of Israel, as supported by the USA and by the government of our own country. There is much hypocrisy here.