Israel’s Settlers Are Burning Olive Trees and Beating Elders During Ceasefire
As the world hails a ceasefire, settler attacks surge across the occupied West Bank — burning groves, slaughtering livestock, and terrorizing Palestinian families under army protection.
This week, Israeli settlers were caught on camera torturing and slaughtering sheep in a Palestinian family’s barn. It’s one of the latest in a surge of attacks against Palestinian farmers in the occupied West Bank.
Two American Jewish women were also detained near the Palestinian village of Burin in the northern West Bank for trying to help local farmers harvest their olives. They were deported and banned from Israel for ten years. Their “crime” was entering a so-called closed military zone to protect Palestinian farmers from settler attacks.
Just a few dozen miles south, in Masafer Yatta, settlers roam Palestinian farmlands in the South Hebron Hills—harassing families, uprooting trees, torching crops—under the protection of Israeli soldiers.
In another corner of the occupied West Bank, Deir Istiya, settlers and uniformed men opened fire on activists from Rabbis for Human Rights who were helping Palestinians pick olives. No arrests were made. Those who came to help were punished; those who attacked walked free.
This is the logic of Israeli impunity: compassion criminalised, violence rewarded.
A Ceasefire in Name Only
Since early October, when the olive harvest began, the Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission (CWRC)—a Palestinian body that documents settlement and wall-related abuses—has recorded over 150 settler attacks across the occupied West Bank and more than 15,000 olive trees destroyed. The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, warns that October 2025 is on track to be the most violent month since it began tracking settler violence in 2013—despite the ceasefire in Gaza.
While global attention fixated on the truce, settlers seized the moment to escalate their own campaign of terror. They have burned cars, assaulted farmers, and vandalised homes with racist graffiti. What is called a “pause” in Gaza has become an open season on Palestinians in the West Bank. This is not peace; this is apartheid laid bare.
The Olive Harvest Under Siege
Every autumn, Palestinian families gather in their groves for harvest—a ritual of endurance and belonging. This year it has become a season of fear. In Nablus, settlers opened fire on pickers. In Hebron, farmers were beaten and driven from their land. In Taybeh, the largest Christian town in Palestine, settlers set homes ablaze and blocked emergency responders. Church leaders described the arson attacks as “systematic assaults” on Christians across Palestine. Muslim, Christian, child, elder—it makes no difference. If you are Palestinian, you are a target.
Such scenes are not anomalies; they are the system. The UN human rights office (OHCHR) has documented that settler attacks occur “with the acquiescence, support, and in some cases participation, of Israeli security forces.” When soldiers shield the assailants, when courts look away, what remains is a single, chilling truth: the state is the crime.
From Apartheid to Genocide
What began as land theft has metastasised into something darker. The forced displacement of Palestinian families, the burning of their trees, the desecration of churches and mosques—this is not the by-product of conflict; it is the policy itself. The slow violence of ethnic cleansing is now accelerating toward genocide.
Today, for the second time this week, armed Israeli settlers attacked a group of solidarity activists in the Wadi Abbas area in the occupied West Bank
Meanwhile, over a million settlers now live illegally on occupied land, many armed, subsidised, and defended by Western money and silence. Billions in U.S. aid and European trade flow to the very regime that enables these crimes. The occupation persists because it pays.
The West’s Double Standard
When journalist Louis Theroux interviewed settler leader Daniella Weiss —a woman who glorifies expelling Palestinians— British Airways proudly sponsored the episode. But when he later spoke with a musician who criticised Israel’s army, the company swiftly pulled its support. Endorsing a coloniser is acceptable; challenging colonisation is too “political.”
This is how Israeli impunity endures: sanitised, corporatised, normalised. Western institutions recoil not from apartheid, but from naming it.
No Peace Without Justice
As Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine, put it:
Under international law, UN member states are obligated not to aid or recognise an illegal occupation—and to work to end it. Yet weapons continue to flow, and Western governments continue to underwrite an apartheid system with taxpayer money.
Peace without justice is an illusion. It is a pause before the next massacre.
The olive trees will keep growing—even if scorched, even if shattered. Long after the guns fall silent, they will still bear witness: twisted, scarred, alive. They are not symbols; they are evidence—of all that was taken, and of all that must be reclaimed. What’s at stake is not their roots, but ours—whether we still recognise this as our fight, or let history remember that we turned away while the oldest living witnesses in this land burned.
This is the video showing the grandmother seen in the first photograph that was beaten by an Israeli settler.
Louis Theroux never endorsed that despicable person I don't even want to name. Instead he called her out for her sickening racism.
😞 Deeply disturbing.