Palestinian olive farmer Mohammed Haj Mohammed was shocked when he entered his orchard this week. More than a hundred of his olive trees were found to be seriously damaged: the bark had been chopped off around the trunk with an ax or saw. “Completely dead,” he says, holding a dry branch from one of the trees. “The water can no longer reach the leaves.”
When exactly it happened, the olive farmer does not know. He is not always allowed to enter his country by the Israeli army. But he does have a suspicion where the perpetrators come from: from one of the Israeli settlements that lie around his village Jalud. “It’s a drama,” says Haj Mohammed. “My grandfather had planted those trees 55 years ago.”
The first autumn rains each year signal the beginning of the olive harvest in the Palestinian territories. It is a festive highlight on the calendar for many families. But every year there is also a lot of violence between Israeli settlers and Palestinian farmers. And after a sharp increase in settler violence in recent months, many people are bracing themselves.
More than 600,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank, including in East Jerusalem, among some 3 million Palestinians. Here’s where those spots are:
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