- The recent Israel-Hamas ceasefire prompted Gazan farmers to salvage what remained of their 2024 olive harvest two months late.
- However, Israeli settlers tripled their attacks on West Bank olive farmers during the 2024 harvest, destroying 3,100 trees and injuring dozens. Restricted access to their land cost Palestinian farmers 1,365 tons of oil, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture.
- Despite violence and restrictions, the West Bank produced 27,300 tons of olive oil — far exceeding forecasts.
- Israeli settlers have degraded Palestinian agricultural areas through arson, wastewater pollution and trash dumping as the Israeli state exploits Ottoman-era laws to seize land.
After Israel and the de facto government of the Gaza Strip, Hamas, agreed to a ceasefire beginning Jan. 19, Gaza’s olive farmers headed back to what’s left of their Khan Yunis and Rafah olive groves for an unprecedented January 2025 harvest.
Bombing by the Israeli government over the last year reduced the Gaza Strip’s 37 olive presses to just four, according to the U.N. humanitarian affairs office (OCHA), and most displaced farmers could not reach their groves in 2024 for the usual October-November harvest. The Israeli government launched this latest 15-month- long attack on the Gaza Strip in response to a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 2023.
“Around 74% of the cultivated olive area was destroyed … equivalent to the loss of approximately 2,290,000 olive trees,” Mahmoud Fatafta, spokesperson for the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture told Mongabay.
It’s a small harvest at around 50 tons so far, but scarce rainfall this winter means lower water content in the olives, which preserved oil quality despite the two-month wait, according to Fatafta. Farmers were not able to test oil quality in the labs, because those had also been destroyed, so experienced sensory taste testers were used instead, he noted.
Meanwhile, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Israeli settler attacks tripled on olive farmers and their land during the 2024 harvest, compared with the three years prior, according OCHA.
“We witnessed increased settler violence, including the burning of ancient trees and theft of both olives and young saplings,” said Aya Gazawi Faour, co-founder of the Palestinian olive oil broker Olive Odyssey, which works with olive farmers across the West Bank.
The West Bank has been militarily occupied by Israel since 1967, when the state began settling Palestinian land in contravention of the Geneva Convention’s Article 49. The International Court of Justice advised in 2024 that this occupation is illegal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu branded this an “absurd opinion in the Hague” on X, claiming the lands are the “historical homeland” of the Jewish people. The Israeli government’s press office did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment.
Olive trees cover almost half of the West Bank and Gaza’s agricultural land, forming an integral part of the regions’ economy and culture. The industry brings in hundreds of millions of dollars annually. Many of the mostly indigenous trees are hundreds of years old.
“These trees know our ancestors,” Faour said. “They’re older than the occupation and older than most of us.”
The olive tree is also important to Israel; symbolizing peace and longevity it was chosen as the state’s national tree in 2021.
Violence and denied access to land
OCHA recorded 260 olive harvest-related violent incidents by Israeli settlers in the West Bank during October and November 2024, impacting 89 Palestinian communities. According to the OCHA, settlers injured 57 people while Israeli armed forces injured 11. More than 3,100 trees, mostly olives, were burned, cut down or otherwise damaged. The total number of trees destroyed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023, is more than 52,300, according to the Land Research Center. This is around 4% of the olive trees recorded by the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture in the region, in just 15 months.
Increased roadblocks, curfews and checkpoints set by the Israeli military also made access difficult for farmers and farmworkers in the West Bank. Olive farmers with land close to Israeli settlements have to apply for permits to enter their land. This practice peaked during the 2023 harvest when Israel denied permits for 110,000 dunums (a dunum is around 1,000 square meters [10,760 square feet] or four tennis courts), according to Fatafta.
In 2024, Israel denied access to 35,000 dunums, according to Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture records. The lost crop from that land constitutes an estimated 1,365 tons of oil worth around $8.5 million at 2024 prices.
B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, has recorded more than 50 stories of barred access, theft and harm to farmers and their lands during the 2024 harvest, in an interactive map.
“The biggest challenge for farmers is accessing their agricultural lands,” said Saba Bloot, who used to work on Om Sleiman Farm, an agroecology organic vegetable producer, adding that “practices of the Israeli army have become harsher and more malicious. Farmers are deprived of the freedom to move within their lands and properties, with some areas being classified as ‘state land’ to facilitate theft.”
Collectively, these acts erode centuries-old agricultural and community traditions “as younger generations face difficulties in participating in traditional practices,” Faour said. “The more time passes by, the more violence we are witnessing. And the more land theft is happening.”
Huge achievement
But against all odds, the 2024 harvest in the West Bank smashed Ministry of Agriculture yield forecasts, generating an estimated $184 million.
“We had anticipated a production of around 18,000 tons of olive oil in the West Bank, while approximately 27,300 tons of oil were produced,” Fatafta said.
In areas where Olive Odyssey farmers were able to access their land, Faour said the yield was good, “and the oil quality has been exceptional, despite the challenges — robust and peppery with a beautiful golden-green color.”
Around 200,000 Palestinians lost their permits to work in Israel after the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7 in 2023. “The agricultural sector became the only work source for them,” Fatafta said. This influx of workers goes some way to explaining the higher-than-expected yield in 2024, he said. Yield predictions were also made based on 2023 access restrictions, which were higher in the immediate aftermath of Oct. 7.
Olive tree planting at the Trees for Life project also saw increased engagement, rising from 35,000 to 50,000 trees in 2024, according to communications manager Charlotte Borger of the social enterprise Zaytoun, which campaigns for the project. Run by the Palestinian Fair Trade Association, Trees for Life promotes sustainable agriculture and supports farmers across the West Bank. The increased demand to plant olive trees and other crops also likely reflects, “farmers and young people seeking economic alternatives due to rising unemployment” Borger said.
An organization called Faz3a, a colloquialism for “reinforcement,” also helped more farmers harvest their olives, thereby raising the yield, according to Fatafta. Faz3a is a Palestinian-led initiative that organizes international civil protection for Palestinians. Part of their mission is to “mobilize a mass presence of internationals on the ground, providing direct protection for Palestinians, under local Palestinian guidance,” according to their website.
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) collaborated with Faz3a to place mostly western European volunteers where they were needed, in villages between Ramallah and Tulkarem, to dissuade settlers from hassling Palestinian farmers.
“2024 has felt very different from previous years,” an ISM spokesperson who wished to remain anonymous for personal security reasons said. Even after decades of settler violence and harassment supported and aided by Israeli forces, ISM volunteers noted an uptick in violence and harassment of local communities even with volunteers present. “[Volunteers] on many occasions [were] forced to leave Palestinian land together with the land owner,” the spokesperson said, adding, “The level and intensity of crimes committed is unbearable, and the push to ethnically cleanse the West Bank … has definitely escalated.”
Faz3a also distributed electric-powered tools to speed up the harvest, meaning more olives picked even though permits severely restricted access, sometimes to as little as two days.
“It was another year where our farmers and farmers in Palestine in general came together and showed us what this season means to our people” Faour said. “Despite everything, it was incredible to watch everyone work so hard together to have a good season.”
Access to land
The Million Tree Campaign, a regeneration project run by the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature, flagged “accessing land and the heightened violence directed at farmers by settlers” as their main challenges, according to Lisa Shahin, the organization’s advocacy and research officer. The campaign plants fruit, nut and olive trees across the West Bank and expanded in March 2024 to plant crops, rehabilitate greenhouses and help poultry farmers and fishers in Gaza. Their mission is to counteract “Israel’s deliberate confiscation of agricultural lands” and build farmers’ capacity to manage and sustain their land, their website says.
Despite the increased challenges of the past 17 months, “our determination only grew stronger,” Shahin said. The organization has planted 99,458 trees and 970 dunums of crops, helping to support more than 9,000 people dependent on farming livelihoods in the process. according to Shahin.
Shahin described settler aggression as playing “a major role” in the survival rate of trees planted, alongside Israel’s access and water restrictions causing losses.
Motives to degrade land
In addition to directly targeting olives and other crops, many reports outline a litany of other land degradation caused by Israeli settlers on Palestinian land.
“The settlers are dumping trash, dumping spoil, their wastewater is coming out of the pipes and getting onto the land,” said Dror Etkes, a researcher who has documented such incidents in the West Bank since 2002. The motivation “to litter, to demolish, to downgrade, to harm” has its roots in transferring land rights by manipulating laws to take land from its owners, according to Etkes. Ariel Municipality did not respond to Mongabay’s requests for comment on reports of the Israeli settlement’s wastewater polluting Palestinian land.
Land registry stopped when the Israel militarily occupied the West Bank in 1967. At that time, around two-thirds was still unregistered. That land still technically falls under the Ottoman Land Code of 1858, Etkes said. Under previous Jordanian and British governance, this code was interpreted such that cultivating land for 10 years gave the farmer rights to it that remain even if cultivation stops.
Israel’s land declarations policy has turned this concept “on its head,” Etkes said. The Israeli policy interprets the 1858 code to mean that if cultivation ceases after 10 years, the land goes to the state.
“The Ottoman state wanted you to cultivate the land, so you can be taxed. Israel doesn’t want you to cultivate the land, so the land can be taken from you,” Etkes said. Supporting land retention is crucial, according to Borger, and “land is more likely to be confiscated if it is not farmed,” she said.
Olive trees especially are a symbol of resilience, but cultivating and regenerating any form of Palestinian agricultural land is rarely, if ever, just about farming. “Our work is not only about trees or land, it is about existence, about dignity and about green resistance against occupation,” Shahin said. Working on the ground with the Million Tree land regeneration campaign to stem Israel’s land confiscation is “a deep responsibility and an undeniable source of hope.”
Banner image: An olive nursery in Jenin, West Bank. Image courtesy of the Palestinian Fair Trade Association.
Palestinian olive farmers hold tight to their roots amid surge in settler attacks
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