“Jews have a right to everything before Arabs in this country,” an IDF soldier told Palestinians while blocking access to their own olive grove. Settlers, however, were allowed to stay. At least 14 Palestinians were wounded, and at least 7 were detained over the weekend. This is the second weekend of the olive harvest in the West Bank. For 80,000 to 100,000 Palestinian families, it provides a major of income. And for that very reason, the harvest is heavily targeted by settler terrorists and the IDF. In many areas of the West Bank, mostly near settlements, Palestinians are forced to obtain an IDF permit to reach their groves. The military often severely restricts access or denies it outright. Where permits aren’t required, settlers attack harvesters, and the IDF then comes in to back them up. Near Birzeit, a group of Palestinians and Rabbis for Human Rights activists came to harvest, only to be attacked with clubs by settler terrorists who had broken into the grove. The activists called the IDF, which allowed the terrorists to stay, but detained a Palestinian farmer and ordered all the harvesters to leave. Last week, the IDF explicitly warned olive grove owners that they would not be allowed to harvest their olives if solidarity activists were present. This is only one example of how settlers, terrorists, and the IDF work together to prevent Palestinians from harvesting their olives. Since the harvest began, @Yesh_Din has documented at least 109 incidents of settler violence directly related to the harvest in 75 localities across the West Bank. Settler terror, however, is only the tip of the iceberg. It is the IDF that plays the central role. The IDF not only protects settler terrorists, sometimes even as they steal olives or attack Palestinians right before soldiers’ eyes. It also maintains a permit system that makes harvesting nearly impossible for tens of thousands of Palestinian farmers. Attacks on the olive harvest are part of Israel’s broader policies of ethnic cleansing and annexation in the West Bank. Through terror and destroyed livelihoods, Palestinians are forced off their land. Since October 2023, over 4,700 Palestinians, roughly half of them children, have been displaced.

It’s the fifth day of the siege of Palestinian homes in Qusra, in the West Bank. Now, the IDF claims it is launching an operation in the village to “protect the residents.” We have a couple of questions: Dozens of settlers have besieged the homes for five days. Why didn’t the army stop them right away and instead chose to pray with them and stop journalists, activists, and ambulances trying to reach the family? The settler outpost from which the perpetrators came was established in January and has been involved in dozens of terror attacks. Why isn’t this outpost evacuated? The IDF has the capacity to impose a lockdown on entire Palestinian villages or even cities, demolish dozens of homes, uproot hundreds of olive trees, and forcibly displace tens of thousands of people. How come stopping a few dozen settlers from besieging a Palestinian family in a village where Israelis aren’t even allowed to be is such an impossible task for the army? There is only one answer: backing ethnic cleansing is the IDF’s policy. The army had all the tools to prevent the siege from happening in the first place or to break it from day one. Instead, it took an active part in maintaining it, both in Qusra and in Jalud, where a family was expelled after a two-week siege in July. And now, under tremendous international pressure, the IDF is still failing to even pretend that it is trying to confront violent settlers.