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Israel uprooted and bulldozed more than 8,000 trees, most of them olive trees, in the West Bank in just one week, according to documentation released by the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture on Thursday. The ministry estimated the financial losses at around $7 million.
The ministry said Israeli army forces and settlers carried out the attacks as part of an intensifying escalation that directly targeted the agricultural sector and sources of food security in Palestinian areas.
It described the situation as a “dangerous and rapidly increasing” escalation, noting that the attacks took place during the third week of December and were part of what it called a systematic policy aimed at seizing land and removing its original residents.
According to the report, most of the attacks were concentrated in the northern and central West Bank. Israeli forces uprooted about 5,000 olive trees in the town of Silat al-Harithiya, west of Jenin, and another 3,000 olive trees in Turmus Ayya, east of Ramallah.
The ministry also recorded separate bulldozing operations that destroyed 156 olive trees in Mukhmas, east of Jerusalem, and 100 fig trees in the towns of Ramin and al-Nazla al-Sharqiya in the Tulkarm area.
Further damage included the uprooting of 13 olive trees in Al-Funduk village, east of Qalqilya, and 19 olive trees, including 10 old trees, in Deir Istiya in Salfit and Al-Minya in Bethlehem.
READ: Palestinian baby injured, olive trees destroyed in illegal settler attacks in occupied West Bank
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
