olive harvest

“A Palestinian farmer was seriously injured on Tuesday afternoon when a group of Israeli settlers from Yizhar settlement, south of the northern West Bank city of Nablus, attacked him while he attempted to harvest olives from one of his fields.

Palestinian medical sources stated that thirty-five-year-old Abdul Fattah Hindiyya, from the northern West Bank village of Tell, was wounded.” [source]

This, while accurate, does not convey the truly horrifying nature of violence and blind hatred the settlers showed, nor of the tragedy that even the simplest of tasks are sabotaged. The olive harvest should be a time of rejoicing in gathering olives, communal working… In Palestine it is a time of planning, fear, awareness of very potential savage attacks by colonists, and some desperation to get the job done as quickly as possible.

Just outside of Nablus, 6 masked Israeli colonists viciously attacked local Palestinians harvesting their olives. They slung, via large slingshots, hefty stones, whipped at our bodies and heads.

The attack lasted about 40 minutes.

One of the six attackers slung a large rock at me. Hitting my camera hand, the rock missed my temple. One of the farmers, on the other hand, was not so fortunate, with severe gashes on his head from multiple stone strikes.

At the same time, the city of Nablus was under yet another Israeli invasion.

Explosions began as early as 3 am, with the invasion of Israeli military jeeps and vehicles into the old city and surrounding neighbourhoods.

Early on in the morning, a key resistance fighter was killed, slaughtered by an array of metal bits erupting from a specialized shell. A Palestinian volunteer medic later confirmed his death, explaining his body had been severed in two by the force of the shell shrapnel. Two of his co-fighters, by his side, were injured, one losing a leg to the fire and suffering various wounds over his body, dying two weeks later.

These are men who have not chosen their fate; the occupation of Palestine has chosen them.

Discussing our mutual roles one day, one resister affirmed what I had said about my role here: “You take photos, I fight invasions, my mother is a mother, my sister goes to school.” A simple summary of the many roles we are given or put into, but further poignant by his declaration: “I want to sleep during the night and go for walks in the hills. I want to have a normal life.”

His little sister, 10 or 11 years old, is already a tough cookie, with a quick wit. Yet she is also a little girl, who surprised me one day carrying a Barbie like doll and acting in a girlish contrast to her normally defensive ways. I cannot begin to imagine what she has seen or how many times she has faced soldiers invading her neighbourhood, her home, in the city.

She also wants to live a normal life. In recent years, her mother told me, she has failed at school, despite her obvious intelligence, suffering like many Palestinian children from the stress, uncertainty, and trauma of living in an occupied land, in a city regularly under invasions and ‘curfews’.

The invading forces also chose an old man, a bystander, and shot him fatally. Neighbours confirmed that the man, 70 years old, had answered the knock of an Israeli soldier. Upon opening the door to his courtyard, he was shot directly with at least 3 bullets to his stomach. He died, shortly after, in his nephew’s hands.

The same house was ransacked, shot up, its contents destroyed. One young man explained how Israeli soldiers had entered the home around 2 am, entered shooting. Soldiers surprised the family in their beds, shooting in bedrooms occupied by sleeping residents. The approximately 25 residents in the multi-storied building, members of the same family, were eventually made to leave, sent to another location. Israeli soldiers searched and ransacked the house, then left and sent a rocket from a nearby rooftop through the window of the parents’ bedroom, hitting the ceiling.

The apparent reason was in hopes of killing the resistance fighter they sought, never in that house. The rest of the damage was inflicted by Israeli soldiers while conducting their room to room search.

A woman sitting in her home down the street was shot in her back, one of a spray of 20 bullets from Israeli soldiers outside the home, according to local witnesses. The bullet lodged near her heart, requiring her immediate transfer to hospital, according to a medic on the scene.

Returning from the olive harvest outside Nablus, we joined internationals already in the affected area as human rights workers, accompanying medical teams.

Our luck in getting civilians beyond barricades waned later on when, attempting to acquire permission to pass a military jeep stationed in the centre of the road, soldiers within instead unleashed a series of tear gas canisters and a sound bomb in successful efforts to disperse us. The same soldiers then prevented passage of an ambulance who sought to give medical aid to people trapped within the blocked off area.

One neighbour recounted how when told he and his mother to leave their home, he refused, protesting his mother’s ill health and difficulty walking. Eventually the soldiers’ order stood and he left, joining others from the floors above on the street. They were given no food or water, and were not permitted to use the toilet for most of the day.

In the aftermath of another Israeli invasion, talking with residents whose homes had been demolished by explosions, or greatly damaged by neighbouring homes’ demolitions, I recall the faces. The old woman who repeatedly gave thanks to God that she was still alive, though her home had been invaded again and greatly damaged yet again. The father who explained how his son had survived the imploding floor by hanging on to a window ledge still intact. Also, the young medic who was kidnapped, blindfolded and cuffed after escorting a woman to her home and subsequently giving his ID to the soldiers for inspection. They kept the ID, and him as well. His colleagues testified to his good nature, his non-involvement in politics.

Like the older woman from the previous invasion, Abdullah’s grandmother, surrounded by broken, shot, and damaged evidence of the IOF’s presence, made clear her feelings for non-Palestinians, non-Muslims: “After all Israel has done to us, we still just want peace.” She followed with a request: “We are not asking for financial support from you, just for justice, for people around the world to know the truth.”