World / Middle East

The olive harvest has begun. So have the attacks on the people picking it.

For Palestinian farming families, the harvest is the year's income. This season it is also a confrontation, grove by grove, in the hills of the occupied West Bank.

West Bank · October 18, 2026

The olive harvest is the economic backbone of the Palestinian farming year, the weeks that turn into a family's income. This season it has also become a running confrontation. On Friday, about 80 masked Israeli settlers, some carrying gas canisters, attacked farmers harvesting near Abu Falah, northeast of Ramallah, with slingshots, and set olive groves on fire, according to witnesses cited by Reuters.

Abu Falah was not an isolated case. The Associated Press reported attacks in at least eight villages that day, and NPR counted some two dozen settler attacks on harvesters on Friday alone. Among the injured was Heidi Levine, a Washington Post photojournalist who was beaten, had her cameras and phone stolen, and was hospitalised in Ramallah. When a journalist in protective gear ends up in hospital, the message to everyone else holding a camera, or a harvesting ladder, is hard to miss.

The Palestine Red Crescent tended 14 wounded that day, and Palestinian authorities put the Friday injury toll at about 20. At least four Palestinians have been killed since the harvest began, according to the Palestinian Health Ministry, via AP. The Israeli monitoring group Yesh Din has recorded at least 170 settler attacks since late September, and the United Nations says the past two weeks have seen more attacks than the entire 2025 harvest season. Read that last comparison again: a fortnight now outruns a whole season a year ago.

The official responses came quickly. The US State Department has condemned the violence and called for investigations and legal accountability; Israeli police say they will investigate, and the Israeli military has condemned the attacks. What farming families will judge is not the statements but the charge sheets, because the record of past investigations is exactly why these attacks keep happening at harvest time. All of it is unfolding days before Israel's October 27 election, which gives the violence a political audience as well as a human cost.