The olive trees cried too: Israel’s blockades, settlers and the vanishing Palestinian grove
Amna Swaity, known as “Umm Riyad,” from the town of Beit Awwa in the southern Hebron governorate, could not hide her fear as she finally reached her land—access that the Israeli military had blocked for two years.
“They looked me up and down. I didn’t know what to say, so I just kept walking,” Amna said in a video posted on social media. Her face lit with joy and excitement as she passed through the Israeli checkpoint.
Now in her seventies, she hurried toward her land in her traditional Palestinian dress, embroidered in green, the stitching across the chest worn thin with age. Palestinian women, especially older ones, rarely go out without these embroidered outer garments, even when heading to work. They simply choose the oldest dress—the one with frayed seams. They hold on to these pieces not only as clothing but as expressions of identity, permanence and belonging.
Only two hours to harvest the olives
“I got a permit for just two hours, to pick olives and come back,” said Umm Riyad, whom Al Manassa interviewed a few days after she was finally allowed to reach her land. She held up the permit, issued through coordination with the Palestinian General Authority for Civil Affairs.
It was the first time since October 2023 that she had been able to set foot on her land, which covers about 500 dunams (50 hectares). It lies between two closed gates and the Israeli settlement of Negohot.
But what awaited Amna was a scene so painful she had never imagined it. The land, once planted with hundreds of olive trees and grapevines, was now nothing but torn stumps. Settlers had hacked off the branches to feed their sheep. They burned the vines, seized the well and pumped it dry.
“Grief just took hold of me,” said Umm Riyad. “What was I supposed to do? I started slapping my cheeks,” she added, using a traditional gesture of mourning. Most of the trees were of the old Roman variety, planted by her grandparents around the time of the 1967 Six-Day War, “and there’s nothing left of them.”
“My heartbreak is for the tree at the entrance to the land. We used to spend three days just picking the olives off that one,” she said, recalling the harvests before the war. “We used to pick the whole land. The whole family would go—sons, daughters, daughters-in-law, grandchildren. We’d spend two weeks or more there and still barely keep up,” she said, her voice catching.
A massacre of trees
According to Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission figures, the occupation has installed 916 checkpoints and gates across the West Bank, encircling Palestinian communities and cutting them off from their land. The commission’s report this year documented more than 1,880 attacks on Palestinian land and natural resources over the past two years, damaging thousands of dunams.
Since Oct. 7, 2023, there have been 1,132 attacks specifically targeting Palestinian trees, affecting 48,728 trees, including 37,237 olive trees.
A research study notes that the occupation disrupted two consecutive olive harvest seasons, in 2023 and 2024. Around 100,000 families in the West Bank and Gaza Strip rely wholly or partly on the olive harvest, with the sale of olive oil a key source of income.
The tragedy has gone beyond losing the crop to targeting the farmers themselves. Over these two seasons, 29 Palestinians were killed in cold blood in olive groves by armed settler militias backed by the government and operating under the protection of the Israeli army.
Worst season in at least 15 years
Thousands of Palestinians share the ordeal of Umm Riyad, among them farmer Bashir Al-Sous, whose land lies in Wadi Al-Makhrour, west of Beit Jala in the southern West Bank.
Army patrols prevent Bashir from reaching his 80-dunam (eight-hectare) plot, turning the olive harvest into a near-impossible task fraught with danger.
“I had to sleep in the valley with the day laborers so the army wouldn’t block our way again,” he told Al Manassa. He said the situation this year is slightly less severe than in the previous two seasons, but the danger has not disappeared.
Repeated attacks by the occupation army and settlers have contributed to a sharp drop in olives and oil this year. According to preliminary official estimates from the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture, olive oil production for the 2025 season “will not reach even a third or a quarter of last year’s level—only 7,000 to 9,000 tons,” said ministry spokesperson Mahmoud Fatafta.
Palestinians usually have a name for the olive harvest year depending on how much they produce. A season with a plentiful crop of olives and oil is known as a “masiya” year; when production is lower, they call it a “shiltoniya” year.
But Fatafta said this season does not even qualify as that. “It’s worse. We say shiltoniya for a season when we harvest about 50% of what we expect, and this year we’re talking about less than a quarter of the crop,” he told Al Manassa.
He said this is the worst year in at least 15 years. “There are many reasons: climate change, higher temperatures, low rainfall, and the way the rain didn’t spread out across the season. On top of that, the occupation has prevented thousands of farmers from reaching their land to plow it, fertilize it and care for it.”
He noted that 2022 was a much heavier year for production, with a total output of 36,000 tons, according to Ministry of Agriculture figures.
The trees’ sorrow
Farmer Salah Abu Ali, from the village of Al-Walaja northwest of Bethlehem, offers another reason for an unprecedented decline in this year’s olive harvest.
“It’s the feelings and sorrow of the olive trees for their sisters in the Gaza Strip, which were burned by Israeli bombardment,” he said.
Abu Ali draws on Palestinian folk belief: olive trees feel their owners and sense what is happening around them. He told Al Manassa he has never left his land in his 52 years and has never seen such a collapse in the harvest. His groves have always yielded plenty of olives and oil, even in shiltoniya years. His family owns hundreds of dunams of olive trees.
The Palestinian local market usually needs about 18,000 tons of olive oil a year, with annual consumption estimated at 3 to 3.5 liters per person. The surplus is exported, mainly to Arab countries.
Despite a cease-fire agreement in the Gaza Strip, Israeli attacks on Palestinian land, farmers and trees have continued. The Israeli occupation army and settlers carried out a total of 2,350 assaults in October alone, a continuation of the ongoing campaign of state terrorism against the Palestinian people, their land and their property.
The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission’s report said these attacks ranged from direct physical assault to uprooting trees, burning fields, blocking olive pickers from reaching their land, seizing property, and demolishing homes and agricultural structures. At the same time, occupation forces have closed off wide areas of Palestinian land under the pretext of “security,” while enabling settlers to expand inside them.
“Today there are no olives, nothing at all,” said Umm Riyad, unable to find words for what she felt. She decided to go back home, powerless, carrying nothing but empty olive sacks heavy with disappointment.