NABLUS, Palestinian Territories: Palestinian farmer Mahmud Abu Shinar surveys two rows of severed olive trees — something he says has become a sadly familiar sight.
He didn’t see who took a chainsaw to them at night, but he blames residents of an Israeli settlement a few hundred meters (yards) away.
“We came on Sunday and were shocked that all these trees were cut down,” Abu Shinar said.
“I called the landowner. They came and the (Israeli) army and security forces came too. But of course, it was useless.”
Olives are perhaps the most well-known and abundant Palestinian product, with trees lining valleys and terraced hillsides throughout the occupied West Bank.
The first rains after the hot summer months are the signal for farmers to begin harvesting their crop, but it can come with risks.
In many places, farmers say they face intimidation and violence from nearby settlers and call in support from foreign and Israeli supporters, including Jewish rabbis, to protect them and their crops.
Some of the incidents are seen as attempts at revenge following Palestinian attacks on Israelis, even if the farmers targeted were not involved.
In other cases, say rights groups, there is little motivation other than just to destroy Palestinian property.
Some rights groups have distributed video footage of such incidents in a bid to pressure Israeli authorities to act.
Israeli settlers charge that their crops have also been damaged by Palestinians, including an incident in May when around 1,000 grapevines were allegedly destroyed.
More than 7,000 Palestinian-owned trees have been vandalized so far this year, according to the United Nations.
In the whole of 2017, it was less than 6,000, the year before only 1,600.
Abu Shinar said that in recent weeks around 200 trees had been destroyed in fields he works on near Ramallah in the central West Bank, costing thousands of dollars in lost earnings.
“They want the land,” he said, of the settlers. “Who else would come and commit a crime like this?”
The body that represents West Bank settlements said there was also an increase in attacks on Israeli-owned farms, labelling it “agricultural terror.”
Israeli police said they were “investigating a number of incidents when damage was caused to olive trees.”
“There have also been a number of complaints made by Jewish owners of fields of damage caused to olive trees.”
Patrols have been stepped up, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
But rights groups charge that Palestinian crops have long been vandalized by settlers without any serious effort by the authorities to stop it.
Around 400,000 Israelis live in settlements that dot the West Bank and range in size from large towns to tiny hamlets.
The international community considers them illegal.
A few dozen kilometers north of Abu Shinar’s trees near the city of Nablus, a small group huddles under a tree, picking through the leaves for olives.
Just 10 meters away stands an abandoned house daubed with Hebrew graffiti, while the Israeli settlement of Har Brakha is over a hill.
Israeli forces patrol the area, with one soldier telling the Palestinians they are “there to help.”
But the farmers said that two days earlier settlers had run down and damaged trees. They claimed the army is often slow to react and sides with settlers.
They invite international and Israeli supporters to attend the picking season to help protect themselves.
Retired British woman Caroline, who declined to give her full name, said she had been coming each year for a decade to work with Palestinian communities close to “particularly difficult settlements.”
This year, she said, she went with a female farmer to her land near a settlement, but the army blocked their path.
“When she eventually got into the groves, 100 of her trees had been chainsawed down by settlers. There weren’t even any olives for us to pick,” she said.
Rabbi Gil Nativ makes sure to wear his kippa cap as he picks olives to show Palestinians not all Jews support Israeli settlement expansion.
“Some (Israelis) consider us as traitors,” said Nativ, who volunteers for the Rabbis for Human Rights organization.
“For me the main principle of the Jewish faith is all men are created in the image of God and all human beings are descendants of the same Adam and Eve.”
Yigal Dilmoni, CEO of the Yesha Council which represents Israeli settlements, said in a statement to AFP that they “deplore all acts of vandalism and purposeful destruction of property.”
He highlighted a series of Palestinian attacks on Israeli settlements.
Olive tree sabotage plagues Palestinian farmers
Olive tree sabotage plagues Palestinian farmers
- Olives are perhaps the most well-known and abundant Palestinian product
- More than 7,000 Palestinian-owned trees have been vandalized so far this year, according to the United Nations
UN chief condemns ‘escalation’ between Yemen’s Houthis and Israel
“The Secretary-General condemns the escalation between Yemen and Israel. Israeli airstrikes today on Sana’a International Airport, the Red Sea ports and power stations in Yemen are especially alarming,” said a spokesperson for UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in a statement.
Bodies of about 100 Kurdish women, children found in Iraq mass grave
TAL AL-SHAIKHIA, Iraq: Iraqi authorities are working to exhume the remains of around 100 Kurdish women and children thought to have been killed in the 1980s under former Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein, three officials said.
The grave was discovered in Tal Al-Shaikhia in the Muthanna province in southern Iraq, about 15-20 kilometers (10-12 miles) from the main road there, an AFP journalist said.
Specialized teams began exhuming the grave earlier this month after it was initially discovered in 2019, said Diaa Karim, the head of the Iraqi authority for mass graves, adding that it is the second such grave to be uncovered at the site.
“After removing the first layer of soil and the remains appearing clearly, it was discovered that they all belonged to women and children dressed in Kurdish springtime clothes,” Karim told AFP on Wednesday.
He added that they likely came from Kalar in the northern Sulaimaniyah province, part of what is now Iraq’s autonomous Kurdistan region, estimating that there were “no less than 100” people buried in the grave.
Efforts to exhume all the bodies are ongoing, he said, adding that the numbers could change.
Following Iraq’s deadly war with Iran in the 1980s, Saddam’s government carried out the ruthless “Anfal Operation” between 1987 and 1988 in which it is thought to have killed around 180,000 Kurds.
Saddam was toppled in 2003 following a US-led invasion of Iraq and was hanged three years later, putting an end to Iraqi proceedings against him on charges of genocide over the Anfal campaign.
Karim said a large number of the victims found in the grave “were executed here with live shots to the head fired at short range.”
He suggested some of them may have been “buried alive” as there was no evidence of bullets in their remains.
Ahmed Qusai, the head of the excavation team for mass graves in Iraq, meanwhile pointed to “difficulties we are facing at this grave because the remains have become entangled as some of the mothers were holding their infants” when they were killed.
Durgham Kamel, part of the authority for exhuming mass graves, said another mass grave was found at the same time that they began exhuming the one at Tal Al-Shaikhia.
He said the burial site was located near the notorious Nugrat Al-Salman prison where Saddam’s authorities held dissidents.
The Iraqi government estimates that about 1.3 million people disappeared between 1980 and 1990 as a result of atrocities and other rights violations committed under Saddam.
Brother of suspected ‘terrorist’ stabs Tunisia National Guard officer
TUNIS: The brother of a suspected “terrorist” on Thursday stabbed a Tunisian National Guard officer in the eastern Monastir governorate, a judicial source told AFP.
Earlier in the day, a National Guard unit attempted to arrest the suspect — accused by authorities of being a member of a “terrorist group” — at his home, said the source, speaking on condition of anonymity.
During the arrest operation, his brother attacked the officer, the source added.
The source said the officer was hospitalized following the stabbing in his abdomen and was recovering after undergoing surgery.
An investigation was opened by the judicial division combatting terrorism, the source added.
Neither of the brothers, both of whom were taken into police custody, have been named, and the Tunisian interior ministry did not respond to AFP’s request for comment.
Tunisia saw a surge in jihadist groups after the 2011 revolution that overthrew the dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali.
Attacks claimed by jihadists in recent years have killed dozens of soldiers and police officers, as well as some civilians and foreign tourists.
Jihadist attacks in Sousse and the capital Tunis in 2015 killed dozens of tourists and police, but authorities say they have since made significant progress against extremism.
Palestinian hospital director says Israeli strike kills 5 staff in Gaza
- WHO has described conditions at Kamal Adwan hospital as “appalling” and said it was operating at a “minimum” level
GAZA STRIP: Five staff at one of northern Gaza’s last functioning hospitals were killed by an Israeli strike on Thursday, the facility’s director said, more than two months into an Israeli operation in the area.
Hossam Abu Safiya, head of the Kamal Adwan hospital in Beit Lahia, said “an Israeli strike resulted in five martyrs among the hospital staff.” The Israeli military did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Israel has been pressing a major offensive in northern Gaza since October 6, saying it aims to prevent Hamas militants from regrouping.
At the other end of the Palestinian territory, the chief paediatric doctor at the Nasser Hospital in Khan Yunis said three babies had died from a “severe temperature drop” this week as winter cold sets in.
Doctor Ahmed Al-Farra said the most recent case was a three-week-old girl who was “brought to the emergency room with a severe temperature drop, which led to her death.”
A three-day-old baby and another “less than a month old” died on Tuesday, he said.
Meanwhile, in central Gaza, a Palestinian TV channel affiliated with a militant group said five of its journalists were killed on Thursday in an Israeli strike on their vehicle in Gaza, with Israel’s military saying it had targeted a “terrorist cell.”
Witnesses said a missile struck the van while it was parked outside Al-Awda Hospital in Nuseirat.
The three-week-old girl, Sila Al-Faseeh, was living in a tent in Al-Mawasi, an area designated a humanitarian safe zone by the Israeli military that is home to huge numbers of displaced Palestinians.
“The tents do not protect from the cold, and it gets very cold at night, with no way to keep warm,” said Farra.
He said many mothers were suffering from malnutrition which affected the quality of their breast milk and compounded the risks to newborns.
Sila’s father Mahmoud Al-Faseeh said it was “extremely cold, and the tent is not suitable for living. The children are always sick.”
The United Nations and other organizations have repeatedly decried the worsening humanitarian conditions in Gaza, particularly in the north, since Israel began its latest military offensive in early October.
The World Health Organization has described conditions at Kamal Adwan hospital as “appalling” and said it was operating at a “minimum” level.
Earlier on Thursday, Gaza’s civil defense agency said that five other people had been killed by Israeli strikes during the day in the north of Gaza.
Meanwhile, the Israeli military said a 35-year-old soldier was killed in the central Gaza Strip. It brings to 390 the number of Israeli soldiers killed since the start of ground operations in the Palestinian territory.
The journalists’ employer Al-Quds Today said in a statement that a missile hit their broadcast van while it was parked in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
The channel is affiliated with Islamic Jihad, whose militants have fought alongside Hamas in the Gaza Strip and took part in the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel that sparked the war.
The station identified the five staffers as Faisal Abu Al-Qumsan, Ayman Al-Jadi, Ibrahim Al-Sheikh Khalil, Fadi Hassouna and Mohammed Al-Ladaa.
They were killed “while performing their journalistic and humanitarian duty,” the statement said.
The Israeli military said it had conducted a “precise strike” and that those killed “were Islamic Jihad operatives posing as journalists.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists’ Middle East arm said in a statement it was “devastated by the reports.”
“Journalists are civilians and must always be protected,” it added.
The Palestinian Journalists Syndicate said last week that more than 190 journalists had been killed and at least 400 injured since the start of the war in Gaza.
The war was triggered by the Hamas-led October 7 attack last year, which resulted in 1,208 deaths, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory military campaign has killed at least 45,399 people in Gaza, a majority of them civilians, according to figures from the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry that the UN considers reliable.
Israeli attorney general orders probe into report that alleged Netanyahu’s wife harassed opponents
- Program uncovered a trove of WhatsApp messages in which Mrs. Netanyahu appears to instruct a former aide to organize protests against political opponents
JERUSALEM: Israel’s attorney general has ordered police to open an investigation into Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wife on suspicion of harassing political opponents and witnesses in the Israeli leader’s corruption trial.
The Israeli Justice Ministry made the announcement in a terse message late Thursday, saying the investigation would focus on the findings of a recent report by the “Uvda” investigative program into Sara Netanyahu.
The program uncovered a trove of WhatsApp messages in which Mrs. Netanyahu appears to instruct a former aide to organize protests against political opponents and to intimidate Hadas Klein, a key witness in the trial.
The announcement did not mention Mrs. Netanyahu by name, and the Justice Ministry declined further comment.
But in a video released earlier Thursday, Netanyahu listed what he said were the many kind and charitable acts by his wife and blasted the Uvda report as “lies.”
It was the latest in a long line of legal troubles for the Netanyahus — highlighted by the prime minister's ongoing corruption trial.
Netanyahu is charged with fraud, breach of trust and accepting bribes in a series of cases alleging he exchanged favors with powerful media moguls and wealthy associates. Netanyahu denies the charges and says he is the victim of a “witch hunt” by overzealous prosecutors, police and the media.
