After Israel and the de facto government of the Gaza Strip, Hamas, agreed to a ceasefire beginning Jan. 19, Gaza’s olive farmers headed back to what’s left of their Khan Yunis and Rafah olive groves for an unprecedented January 2025 harvest. Bombing by the Israeli government over the last year reduced the Gaza Strip’s 37 olive presses to just four, according to the U.N. humanitarian affairs office (OCHA), and most displaced farmers could not reach their groves in 2024 for the usual October-November harvest. The Israeli government launched this latest 15-month- long attack on the Gaza Strip in response to a Hamas-led attack on Israel on Oct. 7 2023. “Around 74% of the cultivated olive area was destroyed … equivalent to the loss of approximately 2,290,000 olive trees,” Mahmoud Fatafta, spokesperson for the Palestinian Ministry of Agriculture told Mongabay. It’s a small harvest at around 50 tons so far, but scarce rainfall this winter means lower water content in the olives, which preserved oil quality despite the two-month wait, according to Fatafta. Farmers were not able to test oil quality in the labs, because those had also been destroyed, so experienced sensory taste testers were used instead, he noted. Meanwhile, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, Israeli settler attacks tripled on olive farmers and their land during the 2024 harvest, compared with the three years prior, according OCHA. “We witnessed increased settler violence, including the burning of ancient trees and theft of both olives and young saplings,” said Aya Gazawi Faour,…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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