Palestinian olive harvests show marked decline as Israeli settlers 'poach' crops

AWARTA, Occupied West Bank: The Israeli soldier swings the large metal gate open and an extended family of sun-hardened Palestinian farmers file out, with boys in dusty shirts driving donkeys past snarls of barbed wire. The troops have said they are allowed to return the next day but Mahmoud Qoariq, a family patriarch who at 71 still tends to the gaunt and ancient trees, scoffs at the four or five sacks of olives lashed to the donkeys.

"Before the Intifada we could come and go as we pleased. Every day we would leave with 20 bags, just like these," he says, referring to the period before the latest Palestinian uprising, which erupted in 2000.

But for the last five years this particular grove of 280 olive trees has come between two rings of fencing that encircles the illegal hilltop Jewish settlement of Itamar, which the farmers say has decimated their crop.

The farmers, who are only allowed within the fences for a few days a year, say the settlers steal most of their crop before they arrive, often in plain view on the rocky slope above the fence.

"I was picking olives outside the fence the other day and I saw them picking our olives," says Zuhair Darawshi, 27, whose family plot of some 250 trees has been cut in half by the Israeli-constructed barrier.

Other farmers accuse the settlers of stripping the trees bare and even burning them.

"On a good day I used to come back with four sacks of olives, but today I only have half a sack and there is nothing left to pick. Since they built the fence the settlers have stolen almost everything," Darawshi says. More...