
Akram Imran and Mohammed Zaben. For the first time, the two Palestinian farmers were unable to get to their olive trees for even one day to pick the fruits they had waited for all year.Credit: Alex Levac
Akram Imran and Mohammed Zaben sit side by side in a yard and cast sad gazes at the valley and the mountain across the way. The view is as sad as it is spectacular. Their olive groves lie on the mountain’s verdant slopes – you almost feel as if you could stretch out your arm and touch them – but they can’t get to them. With the settlement of Yitzhar sprouting evil from the summit of the mountain, for years these farmers have only been able to harvest their olives via “coordination” with the Israel Defense Forces.
But this year, because of the war, the IDF refused “to coordinate,” meaning the farmers didn’t enjoy even the few days of harvesting they generally get. War. Last week, as the olive-harvesting season ended, for the first time in their lives the two Palestinian farmers were unable to get to their trees for even a single day to pick the fruits they had waited for all year. All they can do now is to look wistfully from the sun-drenched yard toward the grove, where the fruits languish on the trees, as they are ravaged by insects and other pests.
Imran and Zaben are not alone. All across the West Bank, the olive harvest was banned in places where there are settlements close by. Generally, by coordinating with the IDF, the farmers are permitted three days to harvest their olives on these lands – although in some cases settlers forcibly prevent them from doing so after the first day – but this year, even that was not allowed.

The Palestinian village of Burin and the Israeli settlement of Itzhar last week. The village has been subjected to settler terror for years.Credit: Alex Levac
The punishment thus inflicted on the farmers is multilayered. First, their villages lost some of their lands when settlements were first established on them. Afterward, they had a hard time accessing even the areas abutting the land lost to the settlements, and this year they were denied access altogether. According to an investigation by Abdulkarim Sadi, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, about a third of the olive crop in the West Bank was not harvested this year. The damage to the Palestinian economy is estimated at millions of shekels.
A loss on that scale would be very significant any year, but in a year in which a full closure has been imposed on the territories for the past three months, preventing at least 150,000 Palestinians from entering Israel to work, the financial loss from the harvest is especially acute. Not many other sources of livelihood remain.
But it’s not just the money. The days of the harvest are among the most beautiful of the year for Palestinians who work the land and their families. Much has been written about the Palestinians’ bond with their olive trees and about the harvest, which takes on the trappings of a folk and family festival, as men, women, the elderly and the very young gather together on the family’s land for a few days every year, spread plastic sheets on the ground under the trees, climb on ladders and pick the olives. The West Bank goes into holiday mode, and from the roads you see whole families engaged in the harvest. Incomparable days.
This year, however, such sights were few and far between. The harvesting season, which begins officially on October 10 and concludes at the end of December, as declared by the Palestinian Agriculture Ministry, coincided with the beginning of the war in Gaza and amid the strictures imposed on the West Bank in its wake.
An olive harvest in Deir Istiya in November. The damage to the Palestinian economy is estimated at millions of shekels.Credit: Motil Milrod
The road to Burin, the village of the two farmers, Imran and Zaben, tells the story. Hawara is more like a ghost town than the bustling place we once knew. Of 400 stores and businesses in town, the Israeli military has allowed only 80 to open, and only starting two or three weeks ago. This is the punishment inflicted on Hawara after settlers perpetrated several devastating pogroms in the town – burning, wrecking, smashing and breaking. In the wake of a number of terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians, the IDF decided to punish not the rampaging settlers, but their victims. Hawara entered a curfew-like status for months. Now it has opened up a little, but traffic is light and the town is swarming with Israeli troops in every corner, who stop and detain drivers as they see fit.
We proceed north from there to the Hawara Checkpoint, which is the main entrance to the city of Nablus, in the northern West Bank. Since the start of the war, Israel has imposed a lockdown on the urban center from almost every direction. Who cares if a major Palestinian city has been under something close to a siege for three months, for no apparent reason? The residents have to resort to all kinds of rural bypass routes to get into or out of Nablus, in some cases through farmland, or use the Deir Sharaf Checkpoint. Field researcher Sadi waited there for two hours and 10 minutes in order to get through. Regarding the closure of Nablus, the IDF Spokesperson’s Unit this week stated, in response to a query from Haaretz: “Since the start of the war, ’breathing’ roadblocks and monitoring of movement have been introduced in various places across Judea and Samaria, including the city of Nablus.”
In Burin, no trace of the war is evident. The village of 3,000, which lies on the southern slope of Mount Gerizim, is surrounded by olive groves on all sides – and it has been subjected to settler terror for years. A young donkey and a tractor are in the yard of the farmer Imran, and sage leaves have been laid out for drying. Imran, 54, and Zaben, 61, are each the father of seven children. Both wear tattered, mud-stained clothes, and their hands are those of tillers of the soil – broad, bony, rough, like the hands of Israeli moshavniks of the past. Like them, they are also mustachioed.
Here there is no Thai-based agriculture, of course; the livelihood of the two derives solely from the farmwork they do themselves, with the aid of their families. They rely mainly on olives, though each of them also has a small herd of sheep, an even smaller chicken coop and field crops. Sheep herding has also been much reduced here, both because the settlers and the army have prevented them from accessing their pastureland and because of the high cost of fodder.
Hawara in October. Of 400 stores and businesses in town, the Israeli military has allowed only 80 to open, and only starting two or three weeks ago.Credit: Itay Ron
“I have land – but I don’t,” Imran says, summing up his situation. All the land he owns on the other side of Highway 60 is lost to him for the present. He has 35 dunams (8.5 acres) that belong to him and another 120 dunams (30 acres) that he’s been leasing for decades. Two-thirds of his lands, however, lie on the western side of the highway, on the slope of Yitzhar’s mountain. Of 55 sheep, he sold all but 23, because of the dearth of grazing land. His friend Zaben has 50 dunams of his own land and 150 dunams under lease.
Zaben’s estimated loss this year as a result of the harvesting ban is 150 gallons of olive oil that will not be produced, at 600 shekels per gallon. (Palestinians use the term “gallon” to refer to a quantity of 16 liters.) Imran says he lost the produce of the 230 olive trees he couldn’t get to, whose potential yield would have totaled about 150 gallons of oil. This year they were able to harvest only the trees close to home. Every year each has a harvest that totals 3.5 to 4 tons of olives, whereas this year the yield will be under a ton for each farmer. Each of them estimates that he will lose close to 100,000 shekels in income (about $27,000) because of the unpicked olives.
Their troubles started in 2000, with the eruption of the second intifada, although things worsened in 2011. One day that year, settlers axed 117 ancient olive trees in Burin. The villagers filed a complaint with the police, who told them they were lying and shelved the complaint. In 2018, Zaben was attacked while plowing. Three days later, 120 of his trees were felled. The violence recurred yearly as the harvest approached.
The settlers would roll burning tires into the groves to set the trees ablaze and throw stones at the people doing the harvesting from the top of the mountain. The delight of the harvest season faded. At the same time, the order to coordinate olive harvesting days with the army came into effect. Every year, the village council submitted the harvesters’ requests to the Coordination and Liaison Administration, and the army set three days for the harvest.
Palestinians pick olives in the village of Far’ata in the West Bank, in 2021. The days of the harvest are among the most beautiful of the year for Palestinians who work the land and their families.Credit: Hadas Parush
The two farmers say that if a terrorist attack took place anywhere in the West Bank, the settlers took revenge on them during the harvest, despite the coordination with the army. In fact, they say it’s been years since they actually had three days to pick olives. One day, two at most, and the settlers would put an end to the work. Because of the danger, they also stopped bringing women and children to help with the harvest.
The latest incident occurred last year, when 22 olive trees were set on fire and another 24 were axed. They have photographs of settlers in their groves, wearing white Shabbat shirts, in some cases accompanied by teens and women, cutting down trees. In June of last year, 180 trees of Burin were set on fire or cut down. They saw settlers pouring gasoline on the trees and torching them. Along the way, the settlers also burned a tractor that was hooked up to a wagon holding 11 sacks of freshly picked olives, and also a private car.
Last year they were given a reduced allotment of two days for the olive harvest. They came to the groves like thieves in the night, they recall, in order to complete the work before being attacked and before the coordination permits expired. At that time they came with the whole village for protection, in case any of them were attacked. And now, this year, they did not pick even one olive from the land on the mountain.
Volunteers help pick olives in Burin in 2019.Credit: Ilan Assayag
They say, sadly, that this was actually a good year in terms of the crop. But it became the worst year ever, what they describe as the year of “our destruction.” They submitted requests to the village council several times. The council passed them on to the authorities, but the reply was consistently negative.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit provided the following comment to Haaretz: “The IDF and within it the Civil Administration took the necessary actions so that the harvest would be carried out by the Palestinian population in Judea and Samaria, while safeguarding the residents’ security. Against the background of the war, the forces conducted security coordination, particularly in the harvesting areas close to settlements, roads and centers of friction. These measures include, among other elements, coordination and close guarding by the security forces, while making it possible for the Palestinian population to harvest olives in all the areas where this can be done, in accordance with the limitations of the security situation.”
“We pray to God that he will compensate us,” Zaben says.
Now they are looking ahead. Will they be allowed to plow in February? And what will happen in April, with the second plowing? Without plowing, weeds will spread through the groves, destroying the good earth.
Gideon Levy, Alex Levac