On October 7, Ali Hassan Yusor al-Bazzari, 44, went out to harvest his family’s olives near the village of Burqa in the West Bank. His 12-year-old son Danial went with him. Al-Bazzari did not come home. He was killed in what Palestinian officials described as a settler attack during the olive harvest, Reuters reported that day — one more farmer cut down in the groves at the height of the season.
Another farmer, 64-year-old Tayseer Al-Sheikh, put it the way generations of Palestinians have:
“For us, the olive tree is life.”
Al-Bazzari was harvesting a crop his people have grown for more than five thousand years. Olive cultivation in this land is documented back to around 3600 BCE. Under the Ottomans, Nablus was the center of production, and olive oil served as currency. By 1914 there were 475,000 dunams of groves; production doubled again between the 1920s and the 1940s.
The most famous tree of all stands at al-Walaja, near Bethlehem. Palestinians call it al-Badawi, and the Palestinian Agriculture Ministry says it is 5,000 years old. Here is the honest version, because this publication does not trade in myth: no one has scientifically dated it. Fact-checkers who looked into the claim found no peer-reviewed age estimate at all. It may be ancient; the number is folklore. What is not folklore is what the tree means. Yale scholar Irus Braverman calls the olive “the quintessential symbol of Palestinian resistance” — of sumud, steadfastness. In 1964, Mahmoud Darwish wrote:
“If the Olive trees knew the hands that planted them, Their oil would become tears.”
The harvest is not symbolism. It is survival. Olives cover roughly 45 percent of the West Bank’s cultivated land — the figure comes from a 2006 World Bank study and a 2011 UN report, and it remains the baseline everyone cites. Some 100,000 families depend on the crop; some 12 million trees produce about a quarter of the territory’s gross agricultural income. In a good year the harvest yields around 17,000 tonnes of oil, though only about 1,000 tonnes make it into formal export. Much of the rest moves through fair-trade networks: Canaan Palestine, which says it works with more than 2,400 farmers, and Britain’s Zaytoun, buying from some 2,500 family farms.
Getting the oil out is a gauntlet. Of the 66 agricultural gates in the separation barrier, 44 open only during the harvest season. In 2010, 40 percent of permit applications to reach groves were rejected. Yesh Din, the Israeli human rights organization, calls the military’s “coordination” regime for the harvest “a highly effective tool for preventing the harvest” — year after year. In 2023, UN experts reported 96,000 dunams went unharvested, a $10 million loss.
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| Image created using Pomelli by Google Labs |
And then there is the violence — not the slow kind, the kind with chainsaws and gasoline. Through 2023, monitors recorded 30 to 60 attacks on the harvest each season. Then the curve broke: 213 incidents in October and November 2024. Another 178 in the same two months of 2025 — about three a day, more than 6,000 trees vandalized. October 2025 was the single most violent month since the UN began keeping records in 2006, with 264 settler attacks. This season, barely ten days in, Yesh Din had already documented 109 incidents across 75 communities.
The numbers are people.
Hanan Abdel Rahman Abu Salama, 59, was shot dead by soldiers while harvesting near Faqqu’a on October 17, 2024. (NPR) Afaf Abu Alia, 55, was clubbed by settlers in Turmus Ayya on October 19, 2025 — on video, verified by Reuters. (Reuters) Ibrahim Salah, 68, of Far’ata, told B’Tselem how his grove went from 450 trees to 240. In Gaza, 60-year-old Haidar Abu Middain’s 900-dunam orchard was destroyed; this October, Reuters found Gazans harvesting the dregs of bulldozed groves.
And the people doing it are almost never punished.
Yesh Din tracked Israeli law enforcement on settler violence from 2005 to 2025: 93.6 percent of investigations closed without an indictment. Three percent ended in any conviction. The number of investigations has fallen 73 percent since 2023 — as the violence rose. In June 2026, the UN Commission of Inquiry said what the numbers say: settler violence “functions as a means of implementing Israeli State policy.”
The law has words for this. UN experts in October 2024 called the attacks an assault on food sovereignty and self-determination, citing the International Court of Justice. B’Tselem calls it “state violence” and a strategy to cement the takeover of Palestinian land. Al-Haq documented it as a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The Rome Statute lists extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity as a war crime.
The words exist. The enforcement does not.
An olive tree takes decades to bear fruit and can live for centuries. That is precisely why it is a target. You don’t uproot an ancient grove out of fear. You do it because of what the grove proves: that the family you want gone was here before you — and is still here.
The trees are the witnesses. That is why they are burning them.
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