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TURMUS AYYA, Palestinian Territories: The scene shocked many and highlighted the violence of this year’s olive harvest in the Israeli-occupied West Bank: a young masked man clubs an older Palestinian woman picking olives, who then collapses on the ground.
The incident during an attack by Israeli settlers, filmed by an American journalist, took place in the town of Turmus Ayya near Ramallah, a hotspot of violence this year.
“Everybody was fleeing because the settlers attacked suddenly, maybe 100 of them,” witness Yasser Alkam said, adding that one Swedish activist also had his arm and leg broken by settlers.
Alkam, a Turmus Ayya city official, said that the woman, 55-year-old Um Saleh Abu Aliya, was struck as she was waiting for her son to drive her away from a mob of settlers.
“Fighting back would only bring more violence, sometimes with the army’s backing,” lamented Nael Al-Qouq, a Turmus Ayya farmer who was prevented from reaching his olive trees that same day.
Expanded settlements
Not far from the scene, an Israeli flag flapped in the wind at a settlement outpost, illegal even under Israeli law.
The army eventually arrived in Turmus Ayya and dispersed the crowd with tear gas, an AFP journalist witnessed.
But not before the youths who descended on the village burned at least two cars.
The head of the West Bank’s Israeli police, Moshe Pinchi, told his district commanders to find the man who attacked Abu Aliya, according to a leaked WhatsApp message reported by Israeli media.
The Israeli army said that it “works in coordination with the Israel Police to enforce the law concerning Israelis involved in such incidents.”
But Turmus Ayya is far from an isolated case, and AFP journalists have witnessed at least six different instances of Palestinians being denied access to their land, attacked by settlers, or being victims of vandalism during the 2025 olive harvest.
Clashes in rural areas reached new heights this year, prompted by ever-expanding Israeli settlements and a growing number of settlers – not all of whom engage in violence against Palestinians.
More than 500,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied since 1967.
All settlements in the West Bank are illegal under international law.
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Near Turmus Ayya, in the village of Al-Mughayyir, one villager was prevented from harvesting altogether.
“I own ten dunams (one hectare) of olives. All I have left are the olive trees in the garden of the house ... They uprooted it all,” Abdul Latif Abu Aliya, 55, said.
Abu Aliya’s land borders a road on the other side of which three trailers make up a recently-installed settlement outpost.
After a settler was injured during an altercation near Abu Aliya’s house, an army order called for the trees his father and grandfather planted to be uprooted.
Bulldozers then pushed mounds of soil and roots halfway up the field and 100 meters from the family house, making a barrier that Abu Aliya and his family do not cross for fear of being attacked by settlers.
Faced with unprecedented violence during this year’s olive season, the Palestinian Authority’s agriculture minister called for the international community to protect farmers and pickers.
“It’s the worst season in the last 60 years,” Agriculture Minister Rizq Salimia told journalists, adding that this year’s crop was already bad due to poor climate.
Ajith Sunghay, head of the UN’s Human Rights Office in the Palestinian territories, condemned “severe attacks” during this year’s harvest and deplored “dangerous levels of impunity” for perpetrators.
The annual harvest, once a peaceful gathering for the occupied West Bank’s families, has in recent years turned into a series of increasingly violent confrontations involving Israeli settlers, troops, Palestinian harvesters and foreign activists.
Identity marker
The season began in October and will last until mid-November, as Palestinians across the West Bank harvest olives from trees they see as deeply connected to their national identity.
The West Bank boasts over eight million olive trees for three million Palestinians, according to the agriculture ministry’s 2021 census.
Every autumn, Palestinians farmers, but also city folk whose families own a few trees, head out into the fields to pick olives, mostly by hand.
The UN’s humanitarian agency, OCHA, said that 27 West Bank villages were affected by harvest-related attacks in the week of October 7 to 13 alone.
“The incidents included attacks on harvesters, theft of crops and harvesting equipment, and vandalism of olive trees, resulting in casualties, property damage, or both,” OCHA said.

NEW YORK CITY: With Sudan midway through the third year of a civil war, four major UN agencies issued an urgent appeal on Friday for a scaled-up humanitarian response in the country, where millions of people continue to face hunger, displacement and the collapse of essential services.
Speaking during a joint virtual briefing, the International Organization for Migration’s deputy director general for operations, Ugochi Daniels, said the situation was now “the world’s worst displacement crisis.”
More than 30 million people are in need of humanitarian assistance, she added, and her organization has registered 9.6 million internally displaced persons and 4.3 million people displaced across borders.
Daniels said 2.6 million people who fled to other countries have now returned to Sudan. They include 1 million in Khartoum alone, 94 percent of whom originally came from other parts of the country.
She called for the immediate restoration of key infrastructure and public services, and direct support for vulnerable returnees, host communities and internally displaced persons.
“Humanitarian, development and peace actors must work together,” she said, echoing a call by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres for the “immediate cessation of hostilities, the protection of civilians, unhindered humanitarian access and simplified procedures for aid delivery.”
Kelly Clements, the deputy high commissioner of UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, described the devastation and trauma she witnessed and heard about during recent visits to Port Sudan and Khartoum.
“We heard horrific stories of rights violations, the fear, the utter destruction of infrastructure and services … but also the resilience of the people,” she said.
Since the conflict between rival military factions began in April 2023, about 12 million people have been forced to flee their homes for other parts of Sudan or across borders, Clements noted, which is equivalent to about one in three of the population.
“Their biggest concerns are basic services that aren’t available … they are worried about their security,” she said.
Clements also highlighted Sudan’s continuing generosity, saying: “Despite the war and the challenging context, Sudan continues to host nearly 900,000 refugees and asylum-seekers.”
Ted Chaiban, the UN Children’s Fund’s deputy executive director for humanitarian action and supply operations, said the toll of the crisis is heaviest on youngsters.
“What I saw was alarming,” he said. “Sudan is the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, the conflict is escalating, and children are paying the highest price every day.”
About 1.4 million children are in areas where there is the risk of famine or famine is already present, he added. In North Darfur alone, 150,000 children are likely to suffer severe acute malnutrition this year.
In addition, 14 million children are out of school, Chaiban said, which is “four out of every five children in Sudan,” and at least 350 cases of grave violations against children, including killing and maiming, have been verified in North Darfur in the past six months alone.
The World Food Programme’s assistant executive director, Valerie Guarnieri, highlighted the operational challenges the organization faces in its attempts to reach those most in need, even as it expands its reach.
She said that in September alone, it reached 1.8 million people in famine-risk areas, covering more than 85 percent of the assessed population, up from less than 20 percent previously.
“Humanitarian access remains a critical issue, … in Al-Fasher, El-Dugli and Dilling it remains severely constrained,” she said.
The four agencies together called for urgent and sustained international support for their work in Sudan — including funding, improved humanitarian access, and renewed peace efforts — to enable them to deliver full humanitarian and development responses.