'Our olives are everything' Settler violence puts vital West Bank harvest on hold

Around As-Sawiya, rolling hills covered with fields and orchards rise to a horizon that yields to a pristine blue sky.

- Jason Burke and Sufian Taha As-Sawiya

It is a stunning view. But look closer and it becomes clear why the few thousand residents of this small town in the north of the Israelioccupied West Bank say they are under siege - and why the olives are still heavy on the trees two weeks after the official start of the harvest.

From the highest point in As-Sawiya, Mahmud Hassan, the mayor, pointed out the olive orchards on the other side of the highway below the town.

They lie on land owned by local families but are now impossible to reach, he said, without risking a potentially fatal clash with Israeli security forces or with Israeli settlers who live around the town.

In all, about 70% of the town's olives are inaccessible.

"Our olives are everything for us: the backbone of our economy, in our homes, on our tables, in our culture. These last years have brought nothing but misery to us," said Hassan, 68.

The situation is the same across much of the West Bank. Since the beginning of October, the Palestinian Farmers' Union (PFU) has logged more than 50 incidents of violence or damage.

The UN has recorded more: 86 olive-harvest-related settler attacks resulting in casualties, property damage or both. More than 3,000 trees and saplings have been damaged and 112 Palestinians wounded (50 by settlers and the remainder by Israeli forces).

Records kept by the PFU show incidents of violence have soared fourfold, from three or four a day before the war in Gaza.

The latest attacks are "not random, but deliberate efforts to undermine Palestinian rural life", the PFU said in a statement. The Israeli settlers in the West Bank are supported by far-right ministers, part of the country's ruling coalition, the most rightwing in Israel's history.