Palestine weekly: Olive harvest opens under assault 

While olive picking season is yet to officially begin, Palestinians began early efforts to reach their groves this week – and so did the Israeli settlers.

Across the occupied West Bank, harvesters were beaten, trees were burned, crops and tools were stolen, and Israeli soldiers closed land to its owners.

Meanwhile, in Gaza, Israeli strikes continued to ignore a year-old “ceasefire” as the territory’s humanitarian and medical systems slid further towards collapse, with winter around the corner.

A harvest under siege

The week’s violence suggests a bloody olive harvest to come in the occupied West Bank. On October 3 in Jabal Qamas, between the towns of Osarin and Beita south of Nablus, settlers from the illegal Mevaser Shalom outpost attacked a family of harvesters. The pogrom left one man, Hussam Adily, in critical condition, and injured his brother and mother, according to Israeli activist Jonathan Pollack and Arabic-language media reports.

The settlers then entered Osarin, ransacking a home and smashing cars. Although the Israeli military opened an investigation, it said the attackers had fled before soldiers arrived, The Times of Israel reported.

Similar pogroms on Palestinian olive pickers occurred across the north and centre of the West Bank, including in the villages of Rantis, Sebastia, Beit Imrin, Deir Sharaf, Aqraba, az-Zawiya, Ramin and Arrabuna. Farmers were pepper-sprayed, run over, or struck with sticks and fists, with several requiring hospital treatment, according to the Palestinian news agency Wafa and local field reports.

In Beita’s Jabal al-Arma, Israeli settlers opened fire on pickers and forces lobbed tear gas directly at them.

With attacks also came theft: Settlers made off with harvested olives, ladders and tarps in Sinjil – where thefts have been a near-daily occurrence for more than a week, according to Sinjil resident Ayed Jafry – as well as in Rafat, Kafr Ra’i, Faqqua and elsewhere, according to Wafa.

Trees were targeted, too. Near Abu Dis, settlers torched roughly 55 olive trees, along with a family’s freshly picked harvest, according to Wafa. Elsewhere, settlers drove their flocks through Palestinian-owned groves, ruining crops in villages including Burqa, al-Mughayyir and Beit Duqqu, according to local field reports.

Where settlers were not blocking the harvest, soldiers often were. Israeli forces turned farmers away from their own land in Deir Istiya, Farkha, Haris, az-Zawiya and Silwan, confiscating identification cards and, in some cases, tools, according to Wafa.

In Beita, the Israeli army halted a harvest after settlers showed up. The incident was the fourth such shutdown that weekend, Haaretz reported, in an area beyond the army’s jurisdiction. Soldiers forced out international volunteers accompanying Palestinians at gunpoint and assaulted journalists covering the attack.

Beyond the olive groves, two Palestinians were shot dead in separate incidents involving settlers and Israeli forces within a day of each other. Mashhour Yassin, 51, was shot dead on October 1 as settlers stormed homes in Yasouf, east of Salfit. The Palestinian Foreign Ministry said that soldiers seized the keys to the ambulance carrying him and threw them away, delaying his evacuation.

Bahaa al-Natsheh, 19, was shot dead the next day near an illegal outpost outside Kobar, according to Wafa and other media reports. Israeli authorities are still withholding his body from his family.

Meanwhile, at a checkpoint east of Tulkarem, a 45-year-old Palestinian man died of cardiac arrest while being detained, according to the Palestinian Red Crescent.

Israeli courts push back

After weeks of increasingly bellicose campaign rhetoric, Israeli institutions this week moved to check some of the governing coalition’s ambitions ahead of the October 27 election.

The Supreme Court unanimously reinstated the Arab-majority political lists – the United Arab List and the Joint List – to the ballot after an election commission voted to ban them. The court also voted 7-2 to reinstate far-left lawmaker Ofer Cassif. However, Sami Abu Shehadeh, the leader of Balad, a component party of the Joint List, withdrew his candidacy under pressure from the justices.

Separately, the election commission chairman fined National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir for using his access to a Hamas prisoner for a campaign video, Israeli media reported.

Israel President Isaac Herzog said this week that Israeli politicians “have not done everything” they could to rein in settler pogroms – remarks that followed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s dismissal of a mass settler attack on Jalud as the work of a “small number” of rioters, The Times of Israel reported.

Haaretz reported that the administration of US President Donald Trump is weighing sanctions against Israeli military units and a blacklist of officers over the pogroms, though any such measures are reportedly being held back until after both Israel’s election in October and the US midterms in November.

The United Kingdom, meanwhile, confirmed that it suspended or rejected more than 80 arms export licences to Israel since 2024, while continuing to supply components that feed into the international F-35 programme, a global defence partnership led by Lockheed Martin. Israel said the UK must close its consulate in occupied East Jerusalem by October 8.

Gaza: Killings persist under ‘ceasefire’

In Gaza, daily Israeli strikes continued to defy the year-old “ceasefire”. The Gaza Health Ministry’s toll since the so-called truce rose from 1,422 killed on September 29 to 1,460 by October 5. This brings the cumulative death toll since October 2023 to 74,243, after 181 previously unverified deaths were added this week.

Five people, including a mother and daughter from Gaza’s small Christian community, were killed when an Israeli strike hit the al-Asala building in Gaza City on October 3, an attack Israeli media said was targeting a Hamas official.

Six people were killed when a drone hit a passenger van in Tal al-Hawa on September 30, among them Ammar al-Sharafi, the brother of Al Jazeera correspondent Momin Alshrafi. A man was killed when his tent in al-Mawasi was struck on October 1.

On October 4, a six-year-old girl died after reportedly being shot by Israeli troops in Deir el-Balah, according to Wafa. A Palestinian journalist, Muhammad al-Najjar, was killed on September 30, becoming the 263rd reporter killed since Israel’s genocidal war began, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office.

Israel also continued to demolish damaged buildings in eastern Gaza City. Satellite analysis put the number of damaged structures across Gaza at roughly 200,000.

Meanwhile, hundreds of Palestinians attended a mass funeral for 105 people recovered from the rubble of several buildings flattened in October 2023.