Violence in the Israeli-occupied West Bank that has spiked during the war in Gaza is raising new alarms about an annual agricultural rite crucial to many Palestinians’ livelihoods: the olive harvest.
Jens Laerke, the spokesman for the United Nations agency for humanitarian coordination, known as OCHA, said in a briefing in Geneva on Friday that the annual harvest was becoming more perilous, noting that a woman working a grove near the city of Jenin, in the territory’s north, had been killed a day earlier.
“The olive harvest is an economic lifeline for tens of thousands of Palestinian families in the West Bank,” Mr. Laerke said, warning that Israeli settlers were increasingly endangering Palestinian farmers, land and production and that “Israeli forces have been using lethal warlike tactics” in the territory. He said that the Israeli military, as the occupying power, had a legal obligation to protect Palestinians in the territory but had at times been complicit in the increased violence.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health said on Thursday that the woman, Hanan Abd Rahman Abu Salameh, 59, was shot by Israeli military fire. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that her family said she had been working in a grove about 200 yards from the Israeli-built separation barrier when a man in a military uniform shot her in the back. Haaretz and Times of Israel reported that a deputy commander had been suspended and that it had opened an investigation. In response to a query about the death, the Israeli military said it was looking into the reports.
There have been at least 32 settler attacks in the West Bank since the start of October that have led to casualties, property damage or both, Mr. Laerke said.
Most of those were related to the olive harvest, according to OCHA’s latest weekly update on the West Bank on Thursday. “Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians or prevented them from gaining access to their lands and damaged trees, stole crops and harvesting tools,” the report said, adding that about 600 trees and saplings were raided or vandalized, affecting farmers in about 15 communities.
The agency’s warnings followed on the heels of other, similar alarms.
The U.N.’s high commission on human rights, in a statement on Wednesday, called it “the most dangerous olive season ever” for Palestinian farmers, citing agency experts and recalling that last year’s harvest had been “marred by a sharp increase in movement restrictions and violence by Israeli forces and settlers.”
The U.N. has recorded more than 1,400 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinian communities since the war in the other Palestinian territory, Gaza, began last October after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks on southern Israel, and Israeli forces have conducted raids and strikes in the West Bank against what they identify as terrorists.
The British foreign secretary, David Lammy, alluded to the issue in a statement on Tuesday announcing the imposition of financial sanctions on settlers and groups identified as supporting violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. Mr. Lammy expressed concern that the rising settler violence could worsen during the harvest, which he said had “traditionally suffered spikes in violence as organized settler groups disrupt and attack Palestinians.”
And a dozen diplomatic missions in Jerusalem and Ramallah — including those from Canada, France, Germany and the European Union — released a joint statement on Monday that called on Israel to “ensure a successful olive harvest” and fulfill its obligation to protect Palestinians in the West Bank.
“It is the responsibility of Israeli security forces to actively prevent Israeli settlers from entering Palestinian olive groves to disrupt the harvest,” the statement said.
More than 2.7 million Palestinians live in the West Bank, alongside about 500,000 Jewish settlers. Israel seized control of the territory from Jordan in 1967 during a war with three Arab states. Israeli Jews have moved in since in increasing numbers, residing there with both tacit and explicit government approval. The far-right government of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has expanded Israeli settlements in the West Bank, despite international declarations that they are illegal.
Some government ministers — including the national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich — have been explicit about implementing policies to speed up Israeli settlement in the territory to thwart the creation of a Palestinian state, emboldening extreme elements of the settler movement and increasingly blurring the line between the state and the settlers’ actions.
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