With more than a month left of the olive harvest season to go, United Nations deputy spokesperson Farhan Haq said on Friday that the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) had recorded more than 200 Israeli attacks on Palestinian farmers since September 1, eclipsing the 185 that OCHA documented across the entire 2025 harvest season. The attacks have already killed one Palestinian, injured more than 120 and damaged more than 2,500 trees. The Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission recorded 34 Israeli attacks on Friday that injured at least 19 people, with another 40 on Saturday.
Israeli settlers are carrying out such widescale attacks and thefts with backing from some religious figures. On Friday, Rabbi Dov Lior, spiritual guide of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s Jewish Power party, ruled that settlers may take olives from Palestinian orchards, proclaiming “Jews are permitted to harvest olives even in areas far from Jewish settlements in order to publicly demonstrate our ownership of the land and thereby fulfill the commandment of conquering the land”. Under this ideological push, dozens of attacks on olive harvesters have been reported each day.
On October 16, in Abu Falah, northeast of Ramallah, about 80 masked settlers armed with clubs charged at Palestinians picking olives. During the attack, Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine, 63, fell and was beaten for more than 10 minutes by settlers, videos and her own account attest. She suffered broken ribs and needed hand surgery, while her camera, phone and passport were stolen.
Israeli activist Jonathan Pollak reported that soldiers later shot a village council member, Abdel Jaber Obeid, in the thigh. Then, on Saturday, masked settlers with clubs attacked a delegation visiting Taybeh, east of Ramallah, that included Belgium’s consul general, French and Polish diplomats, and church representatives. A window of a Belgian consulate vehicle was smashed.
French mayor Bernard Baudoux, 78, was kicked and beaten during the attack. In response to these incidents, United States Secretary of State Marco Rubio said Washington was “very disturbed”, while US Ambassador Mike Huckabee called Levine’s attack “a despicable act of terror carried out by masked cowards”. France demanded arrests and the European Union said it expected “full accountability”.
In response, Israel’s military called the Taybeh attack “severe”, and leader of the Yashar party, Gadi Eisenkot, described settler violence as “Jewish terror under the auspices of the government of Israel”, according to The Times of Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office, however, offered a conditional condemnation of Levine’s attack, saying questions remained about “who initiated the violence”. After the attack in Taybeh, his office equivocated on the matter, too, remarking that “the more serious the accusation, the stronger the evidence required”.
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