Tree by tree, house by house: how the West Bank is being taken
Michael Leonardi writes in The Palestine Chronicle on 16 October 2026:
The olive harvest has opened under fire. On October 7, 2026, armed colonizers killed 44-year-old Ali Hassan Yusor al-Bazzari while he was picking on his land near Burqa. The Palestinian health ministry named him.
The Israeli Occupying Forces said both soldiers and the colonizers had opened fire, and left the distinction where the occupation has always left it: nowhere. That week the Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission logged nineteen attacks in a single Friday.
Groves burned. Trees ripped from ancestral soil. Crops stolen. Farmers beaten in Tal, Qusra, Jorish, Beita, Naqoura, Birzeit, Deir Bzeih, and Farata. More than fifty olive trees pulled out of Qusra alone. Near Yabroud, a man was blocked on the road and beaten until he ran.
The Central Command of the Occupying Forces announced that it had prepared for the harvest, then called the problem friction between two populations, with the added insult that Palestinians might commit “terrorist attacks” under the cover of picking their own fruit.
The fruit is not the cover. The harvest is the claim to the land. The army that arrives to “separate the sides,” and then drives the Palestinians off, is not a referee. It is the second shift of the same campaign.
This year’s harvest is not an aberration. It is the harvest of an ethnic cleansing, and it is the third year in a row that the numbers have set a record. The United Nations has recorded more than 1,600 attacks by colonizers against Palestinians so far in 2026, an average of 6.7 a day, hitting 275 communities. Over two dozen Palestinians have been killed and more than a thousand wounded in the attacks.
Between January 2023 and April 2026, more than 6,400 people, nearly half of them children, were driven from 130 communities. Forty-eight communities have been emptied. The Palestinian Authority counts at least thirty Palestinians killed by colonizers this year, and more than 45,000 trees cut or damaged in the first half of the year, more than 26,000 of them olive trees.
The olive tree is the rootedness of Palestinians to their land. Families have tended the same trees on the same soil for generations. To burn them, uproot them, or steal the crop is to try to sever that root. The numbers are not a trend. They are the method.
On October 8, Democracy for the Arab World Now and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee published the demand that Washington stop paying for it. Their letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Attorney General Todd Blanche includes a list of Americans the United States has declined to protect.
Samed Khdair, 56, a Mississippi businessman, was stopped near al-Mughayyir on September 4 by about twenty armed colonizers. They used pepper spray, rocks, clubs, and pistols. They stole his passport, spat on it, took his phone and his car.
Soldiers of the Occupying Forces watched. When people tried to help, the soldiers fired tear gas. The ambulance was attacked. Khdair was left with stitches and eye damage that may be permanent. His brother could barely breathe. The State Department offered him a replacement travel document and a phone call. His interview was set to air on 60 Minutes. The government that issues the passport has not issued a charge.
He is not the first. Sayfollah Musallet, 20, of Tampa, was beaten to death in Sinjil on July 11, 2025. Colonizers blocked the ambulance for hours. Khamis Ayyad, 41, of Chicago, died of smoke in an arson attack in Silwad on July 31, 2025. Nasrallah Abu Siyam, 19, of Philadelphia, was shot and beaten in Mukhmas on February 18, 2026, while soldiers stood by. Nine US citizens have been killed by Israeli soldiers or colonizers since 2022. None of the cases has produced an indictment that stuck.
The siege of Loai Ridi is the method written on one house. Ridi, 46, a Palestinian American who has lived in Toledo, Ohio, for more than two decades, has been building on his family’s land in Qusra, south of Nablus, since 2023. Harassment around the house began in January 2026.
In March, his brother Qusay moved in to hold it, after the family watched a household in nearby Jalud besieged and then forced out, and the house taken. On August 9, the pressure became a siege. Colonizers set up tents and an outpost at the entrances, blocked the roads with rocks, and cut off the water and electricity.