The Israeli army cut down their trees. They fear the next step will be forced transfer
A car loaded with uprooted olive tree branches in al-Mughayyir, late August 2025
Gideon Levy wriyes in Haaretz on 29 August 2025:
According to Israel Defense Forces figures, 3,100 trees were uprooted this week. They included olive and almond trees, some of them decades old, carefully cultivated by two or even three generations of tillers of the soil. Each one could have been worth thousands of shekels. The 3,100 trees stood on the privately owned land of inhabitants of the village of al-Mughayyir, northeast of Ramallah in the central West Bank. The trees were their source of income, in some cases their last remaining source of income. They also embodied their deep bond with the lands, which have been forcibly wrenched from them by settlers, particularly since the war broke out in the Gaza Strip.
Some of what’s left of the 3,100 trees are now strewn around al-Mughayyir, sawed, chopped up, trampled, degraded. The remaining parts were stolen by the same settlers who have forcibly taken over most of the local lands in the past two years. Maybe come winter they’ll heat their huts in the outposts with the dead wood.
A village without farmland is now also without its olive groves – just a few weeks before the harvest was to have begun. Now the fruit is rotting on the felled branches. This will be the third successive season in which the farmers of al-Mughayyir will not be harvesting their olives. Since October 7, the violent settlers had kept them from approaching them. Now they will never be harvested again.
A horrific sight awaits the visitor to al-Mughayyir. Anyone who loves this land, anyone who feels a connection to nature, anyone who is simply a decent human being – in fact, no one can remain indifferent to devastation of this scale. To the massive bulldozers, military and civilian, that destroyed tree after tree, both those bearing olives and those with almonds – and some cypresses to boot – that shredded and tossed them like refuse on the wounded, gutted soil.
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This time the IDF didn’t even try to conceal its crime. The head of Central Command, Maj. Gen. Avi Bluth, declared that the mass uprooting was part of what he called “shaping actions” aimed at deterring Palestinians from “lifting a hand against any of the residents,” as he referred to the settlers. Clear-cut, explicit collective punishment, unhindered and unabashed – perhaps also a grave war crime. The reason? An attack that lightly wounded settler. When it comes to the daily pogroms of the so-called residents, Bluth won’t raise a finger. No “shaping actions” needed in such cases.
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The road to al-Mughayyir winds through villages; its main entrance is blocked, like most of the neighboring Palestinian communities. Along Highway 60 – the main, north-south thoroughfare in the territories – there are more Israeli flags flying than you see on Independence Day in Tel Aviv, even though the highway lies outside the borders of the recognized sovereign State of Israel.
We meet a few of the town’s leaders in the rundown local council building. The council head, Amin Abu Alia, was arrested by the army – more on that below – and he has been replaced by his predecessor, by his deputy and by an acting council head.
The deputy, Marzuq Abu Na’im, 65, relates that the 3,500 inhabitants of al-Mughayyir once owned 43,000 dunams of land (almost 11,000 acres), reaching as far north as the Jordan Valley. What remains are 950 dunams, the built-up area. All the rest is inaccessible. Violent settlers from the nearby farms and outposts that have sprung up on every hilltop are preventing the Palestinians from working their land.
The thuggish takeover began well before October 7, with the establishment of a small outpost called Malachei Hashalom (Angels of Peace) in 2015. It was evacuated several times by the Israeli authorities but has managed to survive. At present there are 10 wildcat outposts around al-Mughayyir whose inhabitants have taken over virtually all of its lands.
Last Thursday, villagers heard that a settler had been lightly wounded by gunfire near the settlement of Adei Ad; according to the army, he had been shot by a resident of al-Mughayyir. Instantly hundreds of soldiers swooped down on the village – people we spoke to this week said “there were more soldiers than local residents” – and an almost total curfew was imposed on it.
In the 70 hours that followed troops raided and searched all 550 homes in al-Mughayyir, in some cases leaving behind a trail of destruction. Stun grenades were thrown into some houses; 11 people were arrested, four of whom were later released. One of the detainees was the council head, four are brothers of the last resident of the village to be killed – 18-year-old Hamdan Abu Alia. He was shot to death on August 16, when settlers carried out a pogrom there.
A short time after the attack on the settler near Adei Ad, bulldozers were already rumbling toward al-Mughayyir, as though they had only been waiting for the opportunity. The machines started to rip out all the trees standing up to 200 meters west of the Allon Road that connects the Jerusalem-Dead Sea highway to the Jordan Valley. Our sources in the council building say the work was done by two army bulldozers and another 12 civilian ones, probably belonging to settlers, who are paid for such work.
Samir Abu Alia, 60, the acting council head, says 230 of his olive trees were destroyed. He lost 30,000 shekels (about $9,000) from the harvest that won’t happen, in addition to the cost of each tree: about 3,000 shekels. In the past two years he was unable to access his land. Last year he actually managed to arrange a way to harvest dates via the District Coordination and Liaison Office, but when he approached his grove settlers fired shots and he was forced to retreat.
How much worse is the situation now than it was before October 7? “It’s 200 percent worse,” Abu Alia replies. “Two outposts before the war and 10 now. Before the war we could access 25,000 dunams of our land; now it’s totally impossible. Before the war the army was an occupation army but behaved differently. Now it cooperates completely with the settlers.”
Kareem Jubran, director of the field research department of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, adds: “Our greatest fear – and we emphasized this when we presented our genocide report – is that every small incident will now immediately cause an insane Israeli response. We saw that last week in al-Mughayyir. Every trigger can produce genocide in the West Bank, too. What happened here is the proof of that.”
Members of the village council are very apprehensive about the future. They say they have already heard Israeli politicians talking about buses that will transport Palestinians from the West Bank to southern Syria. Indeed, the dread of population transfer hangs heavy in the air here, and the butchering of the trees is for them only a portent.
“That is their goal, for us to leave. It is perhaps a different tactic from Gaza, but the goal is the same,” says Abu Na’im, the deputy council head, adding that in one raid a few years ago, the army took over his spacious house for four days and hung Israeli flags across its whole length. He’s still got the photos.
On the night between Saturday and Sunday this week the army arrested Amin Abu Alia, 53, who has served as al-Mughayyir council head for the last eight years. His colleagues relate that troops encircled his home and took his son, Ubeida, 26, into custody in order to pressure the father to give himself up. The IDF had announced that it would not leave the village until that happened. A short time later Abu Alia emerged, accompanied by friends, and surrendered to the army. He has been accused of incitement.
Roger Cohen, a columnist for The New York Times and friend whom we brought with us, asks the councillors if they support Hamas in the wake of the war in Gaza. Faraj Nessan, 60, a former long-serving council head who was also head of the Coordination and Liaison Administration in the Ramallah district, replies: “It’s not the Palestinians’ political identity that is the cause of what is being done to us. Our council head was not arrested because he is Hamas – he is not – but because he is against the occupation. They don’t want to see Palestinians here, without any connection to their political affiliation. October 7 was not the reason – it served them as the excuse for the genocide in Gaza. When soldiers raided my home on Friday, they found a small flag of Palestine. They threw it on the floor and trampled it. That is the soldiers’ mentality – against the Palestinian people and not against Hamas.”
We are driving to the home of Abdel Attaf Abu Alia, 55, which is at the edge of the village, opposite uprooted olive trees and the Allon Road. He has long since put up a barbed-wire fence around his house and around his olive grove, to block the hooligans from the outposts. He even put up a warning sign: “Extreme danger. Connected to electricity.”
It’s unlikely that the fence is electrified, but now part of it lies between the stumps that were one trees. He had 350 and all of them were uprooted, one after the other, just before the harvest season, before his eyes. He tried to block the bulldozers bodily, but was pushed back at gunpoint. He still has 10 trees in the garden of his home, but cannot set out from there any longer to access his land.
This week heavy machinery was at work nearby, carving out yet more access routes to the hilltop outposts, to make it easier for the settlers to brutalize the inhabitants of al-Mughayyir and cut them off even more severely from their property. The pounding of the excavators is clearly audible.
Aisha Abu Alia, 52, lost 60 dunams (15 acres) of olive trees on Saturday. Bullet holes are visible in the house next door, a memento of the killing of Jihad Abu Alia, 22 (no relation of Aisha’s), on the roof of his home last April 12. He was killed when the army arrived after another pogrom by the settlers, and the soldiers opened fire – standard procedure.
Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative, also arrives to view what the army has wrought. It’s worse than the first Nakba, he tells us. “In the first Nakba you didn’t see fascism like this among the Israelis.”
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