A mayor watched settlers take olives from his own trees and felt powerless
Researchers tracking the violence say soldiers protect and assist settlers in one quarter of cases.
Reuters World News · France protests, Texas Senate race and West Bank olivesAhmed Salem watched settlers strip his own olive trees.
They worked branch by branch, he said, and loaded the fruit into sacks. The sacks were carried to a nearby Israeli settler outpost to be pressed into oil.
Salem leads Alaban al-Ghari in the occupied West Bank, where that outpost has taken over large areas of olive groves. He told Reuters he could do nothing to stop them.
His harvest is part of a larger loss this season. It is olive harvest time, when Palestinian families gather from the groves, but this season many families have returned with nothing. In less than a month, observers have logged hundreds of reports of attacks or stolen crops, and in some cases Israeli forces have fired gas and stun grenades toward Palestinians gathering olives.
The violence has grown as Israel approaches its Tuesday vote. Surveys suggest Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, along with allies who back settlers, may lose to rivals promising tougher action against settler attacks.
What Salem described fits a pattern tracked by Israelis. Ziv Stahl, the director of the Israeli rights group Yesh Din, said settlers arrived with soldiers in about a quarter of cases.
Stahl said settlers, in about a quarter of cases, arrived with soldiers who came "to protect them and to allow them and assist them to actually commit a crime to violate the rights of the Palestinians."
Within Israel, rabbis are divided, with some calling the harvesting theft and others encouraging it, saying Palestinians have no rightful claim to the land. Israel's military says it treats violence and crime as serious, but it left settlers out of its statement and did not address accounts of olives being taken while its troops looked on.
Salem said the olives from his trees were pressed into oil at the outpost.
Questions people ask
What is a settler outpost?
An outpost is a small Israeli settlement in the West Bank, often built without formal government approval but with roads, housing, and security. Many grow over time, and Palestinians say they expand onto farmland and restrict access to fields around them.
Why does the olive harvest matter so much?
Olives are a major cash crop and a heritage food for many Palestinian families. The harvest comes once a year in the fall, provides oil for cooking and sale, and many families own or share groves passed down for generations.
Who tracks these cases?
Yesh Din is an Israeli human rights group that monitors abuses in the West Bank. Its researchers collect testimony, track cases through the military and police systems, and publish data on settler violence and investigations.