Settlers burn and uproot 1905 olive trees during the harvest season

The campaign “You are not alone" launched by Palestinian grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (Stop the Wall) and the Palestinian Farmers Union was carried out for the ninth consecutive year.

The initiative supports farmers, whose lands are threatened and who are facing particularly dangerous situations during the olive harvest. Once again, many volunteers in each of the various governorates of the West Bank joined the initiative and helped olive picking in areas adjacent to settlements and the apartheid Wall and on lands threatened with confiscation. Other focus points of the efforts were places where farmers had recently suffered from attacks carried out by the settlers protected by the Israeli military. The Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign documented dozens of attacks and violations carried out on a daily basis by settlers in the occupied West Bank during October 2013. This olive season, we recorded a huge rise in attacks launched by settlers against Palestinian citizens, land and property.

The daily attacks of the settlers during the olive harvest are an integral part of the Israeli overall policy of occupation, ethnic cleansing and land theft. The kind of attacks, the locations where they are carried out and the coordination between the settlers and the Israeli military are demonstrating the existence of a systematic policy. The attacks are aimed to drive Palestinian farmers from geo-strategic locations in Area C, in order to ensure that the occupied West Bank is effectively fragmented into unviable Bantustans and Israel can ensure full control not only of the natural resources but as well the movement – and with this social, cultural and economic development – of the Palestinians living in the West Bank.
The settler attacks vary between the uprooting of olive trees and the theft of the crops to physical attacks on the farmers and preventing them from reaching their land. In particular:

• The farmers owning lands adjacent to the settlements have been subjected to theft of the crops as well as to confiscation of equipment used during the olive harvest.
• At least 1905 olive trees have been uprooted and burned during this olive harvest. With 1356 trees cut, the Nablus governorate has suffered the worst. 45 olive trees were cut in in Hebron, 12 trees in the Ramallah governorate, 180 olive trees in Bethlehem and 312 olive trees in Qalqilya governorates.
• Land has been confiscated. In Artas (Bethlehem district), for example, some 124 dunum of land have been confiscated.
• Cases of willful land destruction occurred. In the land of Asira in Nablus, the settlers pumped toxic sewage water on agricultural land, preventing citizens from access to their land.
• A number of different physical attacks occurred. An elderly farmer was run over by a settler car en route to the olive harvest, various Palestinian cars transporting farmers to their land were pelted with stones, settlers burned tires in the streets to block access to the lands and a number of Palestinian homes were attacked.
• Farmers have been abducted by settlers and the military. The settlers of Elon Moreh abducted a farmer, Adnan Samara from the village of Azmut, while the Israeli military detained Jalal Yamin on the pretext that he picked his olives without coordination with the occupation forces.
• The apartheid Wall and the closure of the gates, that stop people from reaching their lands, have added difficulties to the farmers. This had a particular sever impact in Deir Ghosoon and Atil in Tulkarm district and in Edtna village in Hebron.
• Widespread threats are part of the entire Israeli occupation and apartheid policy. Many Palestinian farming families were threatened not to return to the territory.

October saw as well direct attacks on the residence of Palestinian population in areas the Israeli occupation forces openly declare as zones to be cleansed from their indigenous population. Occupation forces demolished the entire community of Khirbet Makhoul in the Jordan Valley for 4 consecutive times. They demolished two homes in Beit Hanina, north of Jerusalem, and two housing units, an agricultural fence and two water reservoirs in Khirbet Twaiel in Nablus. Two shelters for sheep have been destroyed in Almukaber in Jerusalem. In addition, more than 100 demolition orders have been handed out in the various provinces of the occupied West Bank, with 15 notices for residential buildings in the area of Ras Khamis, Ras Shehadeh and Shuafat refugee camp in Jerusalem.

While these attacks were aimed at ethnically cleansing more land from its Palestinian population, the Israeli occupation forces have issued more approvals for further settlements. In October a project to build 1558 housing units in the settlements of Ramat Shlomo and Pisgat Ze'ev was approved. Further, other plans are advancing in order to construct two new settlement compounds, one near the old town of Jerusalem and another one in the area of Sheikh Jarrah in Jerusalem. In Tur neighbourhood in Jerusalem 32 settlement housing units are under construction. Further, plans for a synagogue at the eastern side of Al-Aqsa Mosque are continuing. Outside the Jerusalem area, 2,200 housing units have gotten planning approval in the West Bank.

Methodology:

The list of attacks documented below does not pretend to be complete. We have opted to list here only those incidents for which detailed information was available. Many more attacks occurred in the same period but the Stop the Wall Campaign does not have precise information as to the extend of the attack, the exact location or date or the recurrence of the attacks.