On Tuesday, 8 October 2024, at around 8:00 A.M., Taysir Salman (52) went with several family members and hired laborers to harvest olives on his land on the Ramin Plain, southeast of the village.
At around 3:00 P.M., a soldier known to residents as a settler arrived from a nearby outpost, armed with a rifle. He had a flock of sheep with him, which began eating the olives the farmers had collected on plastic tarps on the ground. When the farmers tried to drive the sheep away, the soldier attacked them with a stick to make them stop. The soldier called the army, and three more soldiers arrived in a military vehicle.
The soldiers did nothing to keep the sheep away from the harvested olives, and the farmers decided to go home to avoid a confrontation. They put their equipment and the nine sacks of olives they had picked in their car and started driving toward the village, but the soldiers stopped the car. They ordered the farmers to get out and sit on the ground, and detained them for about two hours. Meanwhile, the soldier known as a settler opened the door of the car, tore open all the sacks and spilled the olives on the ground. The soldiers let the farmers go after two hours, but did not let them collect the olives. Before the soldiers left, they ran over the scattered olives with their vehicle, and the first soldier brought his flock to eat the fruit.
About 45 minutes after they got home, the farmers went back to collect the scattered olives, but managed to collect only half a sack’s worth, as the rest had been crushed and destroyed.
Salman said in a testimony he gave B’Tselem field researcher Abdulkarim Sadi on 23 October 2024:
I own some farmland with olive, almond, and fig trees. It’s in a 35-dunam (0.35 hectare) area called the Ramin Plain southeast of the village.
About two years ago, a settler set up a shepherding outpost there, and since then, we’ve had lots of trouble and provocations that have gotten worse since the start of the war in Gaza. In the 2023 harvest season, none of the farmers who own land in this area were able to harvest their olives, and we haven’t been able to prune the trees or plow the land since then, either. Every time we tried, the settler called in soldiers or other settlers from the area, and they stopped us.
This year, on 8 October 2024, at the start of the harvest season, I went with my brothers and some workers, seven people in total, to pick our olives. The outpost was set up a few hundred meters away from our land. We started harvesting at 8:00 A.M., and around 3:00 P.M., a settler showed up wearing a military uniform and carrying a rifle, with about 50 sheep. He brought them into the grove and deliberately led them to the tarps on which collect the olives. The sheep ate the olives. When my brothers and I tried to shoo them away from the tarps, the settler attacked us and hit us with a stick he was holding. He made a phone call, and then three soldiers showed up. They didn’t try to make the settler and his sheep back off the tarps. I think they were standing there waiting for us to attack the settler so they would have a reason to arrest us.
We decided to pick up the tarps and sacks of olives we’d collected and leave, so we wouldn’t get hurt. We loaded the equipment and the nine sacks of olives we filled onto the vehicle and started driving home. As we were exiting the plot, the soldiers stopped us, forced us out of the vehicles, and ordered us to sit on the ground. The settler, meanwhile, opened my car door, took out the sacks of olives, tore them open, and scattered the olives on the ground, in the thorns and weeds, in front of the three soldiers, who did nothing. We were forced to sit there, with the soldiers threatening us with their guns, for about two hours until they let us leave, but without our olives. Before we left, the military jeep drove back and forth over the scattered olives to destroy them. The settler led his sheep back to the entry point to our land, where the olives were scattered, for the animals to eat them. Before he left, the settler broke our harvesting machine in front of the soldiers.
Forty-five minutes after we were forced out, my brothers and I went back to the entrance to our land to collect the fruit. We managed to retrieve half a sack of olives, because all the rest were destroyed.