Press Releases

The Israeli regime is instrumentalizing the 2025 Palestinian Olive Harvest as a frontline of suppression through organized colonizer attacks and systematic obstruction of Palestinian access to land. While far from a new tactic, the deliberate targeting of the 2025 Olive Harvest exposes the false promises made by Netanyahu and Trump regarding not formally seeking to “impose sovereignty” on the West Bank. These actions must be understood within the framework of the Decisive Plan and the accelerating trajectory of land confiscation across the West Bank over the past two years. The Israeli regime’s coercive measures during the Olive Harvest mirror the Plan’s first-stage blueprint: to suppress Palestinian sumud (steadfastness), sever access to land, and dismantle a collective, self-sustaining sector of the Palestinian economy rooted in resistance. By targeting an economy grounded in land and labor that resists dependency, the Israeli regime deepens the West Bank’s economic crisis and advances colonial domination.

The Olive Harvest is a collective act of sumud, and a re-affirmation of Palestinian identity; material and cultural acts that sustain life, land, and heritage in defiance of colonial domination. Anchored in direct labor–land relations, the Olive Harvest sustains thousands of Palestinian livelihoods. Its systematic targeting reflects an effort to dismantle one of the last semi-autonomous economic bases underpinning sumud and collective resilience. The Israeli targeting and attacks on the Olive Harvest function as both a physical and structural instrument of settler-colonial domination, systematically eroding Palestinian landholding.

Israeli and American officials have repeatedly claimed that the Israeli regime will not impose “sovereignty,” i.e. extend its colonial domination over the West Bank. However, the attacks on the Olive Harvest continue and no meaningful measures have been taken to prevent or halt the Israeli regime’s illegal actions, exposing these assurances as empty rhetoric. Netanyahu and the Likud Party further reinforce this false narrative, by framing Bezalel Smotrich’s and others’ initiatives as the work of “extremists,” rather than official policy. In practice, however, the Knesset’s passage on 22 October 2025 of two bills—the Application of Sovereignty to All Settlement Regions in Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and the Ma’ale Adumim Sovereignty Bill—confirms that  Decisive Plan is  being actively implemented through the formal imposition of “Israeli sovereignty” over the West Bank.

In 2023 alone, 96,000 dunums went unharvested due to Israeli attacks and denied access, causing  losses exceeding $10 million – further eroding a fellaheen (farmer) economy and entrenching a dependency-based colonial one that violates the right to agricultural self-sustenance. This year, Palestinian families persist in tending to their groves despite the coordinated assaults of the Israeli forces and colonizers. Israeli forces impose checkpoints and iron gates as instruments of colonial domination, fragmenting Palestinian land into enclaves, while employing “administrative” and “security” barriers as well as live ammunition to deny farmers access to their lands and suppress collective Palestinian resistance to colonizer attacks.

Prior to the start of the Olive Harvest, the Israeli regime meticulously planned its disruption. In al-Mughayir alone, 10,000 olive trees – many over a century old – were uprooted in August 2025, and over 4,000 trees have been vandalized across the West Bank in October 2025. Access to groves in the “Seam Zone” remains severely restricted, with farmers subjected to invasive searches, denials, and gate openings limited to only a few days per year; in some areas, access requests have been fully blocked for consecutive years. This tightening matrix of attacks, “administrative” barriers and the closure regime directly enforces the Decisive Plan’s objectives and pattern of land theft.

The Israeli regime has escalated land confiscation in the West Bank, in parrallel to the ongoing genocide in Gaza, seizing seizing 46,000 dunums in 2024, and further enabling and outsourcing colonizer attacks. Attacks on Palestinian farmers and agricultural lands have surged during the 2025 Olive Harvest, serving as a central mechanism of denial of access to land and eventual dispossession. In villages like Deir Jarir and Atara, colonizer assaults are carried out with the establishment of new outposts that are later formalized as colonies. The pattern is systematic: colonizers attack, Israeli forces intervene under the pretext of “security,” and the land is subsequently declared off-limits, facilitating its eventual formal confiscation. These combined measures have injured over 100 Palestinians and destroyed presses, and resulted in the seizure of thousands of kilograms of olives in Hebron and Bethlehem alone. By outsourcing coercion and framing dispossession as the work of “extremists,” the Israeli regime evades accountability, while advancing its colonial expansion. The coordination between both colonizers and Israeli forces is deliberate  and an attack on Palestinian heritage and continuity: undermining the intergenerational connection to land and labor. By denying access and destroying trees, the Israeli regime inflicts immediate economic harm and threatens the future of Palestinian agriculture for decades to come.

The system of domination  is further compounded by broader Israeli fiscal coercion: since May 2025, the Israeli regime has withheld 10 billion NIS (2.96 billion USD) in tax and clearance revenues from the Palestinian Authority, forcing Palestinian public service workers to survive on half their salaries while unemployment in the West Bank has surpassed 50%. This economic pressure builds on the neoliberal economic reordering embedded in the Oslo Accords, which from its inception eroded the self-sustaining Palestinian economy and made Palestinian livelihoods dependent on Israeli-controlled wages, permits, and regulations. This longstanding economic restructuring has facilitated the intensified economic strangulation as a means of implementing the Decisive Plan. Palestinian life is systematically reshaped around Israeli colonial control, making survival contingent on compliance, and suppressing resistance while denying sovereignty and self-determination.

Even as Netanyahu and the Israeli regime’s allies project the illusion of restraint - distancing themselves from so-called “extremists,” and promoting fragile ceasefires – the regime continues systematic assaults on Palestinian life, land, and labor. The attacks on the Olive Harvest exemplify the operationalization of the Decisive Plan and constitute deliberate measures aimed at annihilating self-sustaining Palestinian economies, severing Palestinians from their land, and replacing collective endurance with dependency. These Israeli violations and crimes persist and escalate, sustained by diplomatic theatre, the absolute impunity granted to the Israeli regime and ongoing states’ inaction and complicity. States bear legal and moral obligations to end their inaction and complicity in these breaches, by imposing political, economic and military sanctions. Sustained international pressure and material isolation are necessary to end the machinery of Israeli colonial domination and colonial states’ complicity.