It’s just the first day of the olive harvest, and six settlers attacked me.

October 18, 2007 6:03 am henrymunsonjr National Religious (Religious Zionists), Settlers

Issacharoff, Bitter olive harvest / Justice falls short in the West Bank - Haaretz, October 18, 2007

Abed Al-Fatah Al-Hindi, a resident of the Nablus-area village of Tal, reaches the main highway between the Hawara and Git junctions, near the Gilad Farm. An International Red Cross crew stands waiting for him. He is bleeding from a large scalp wound, and his left eye is swollen.

A paramedic bandages his head, and a volunteer from Rabbis for Human Rights cleans his face. “Every year there’s a mess,” the villager tells Haaretz. “It’s just the first day of the olive harvest, and six settlers attacked me. There wasn’t much we could do.”

Around seven in the morning, Al-Hindi, his sisters and four other men came to the family olive grove, just 200 meters from Gilad Farm, not far from Nablus, one of the dozens of illegal outposts spread across the West Bank. They harvested for three hours, until 10, when they noticed a group of settlers approaching from the direction of the outpost.

“They shouted, ‘This is our grove, you can’t go near it,’ and threw rocks at us,” says Al-Hindi. “One of them held my arm and another beat my head with a rock. I yelled ‘Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, and they said, ‘I don’t give a shit.’ They beat me until they left.”

…Zakhariah Sadah, a resident of the neighboring village of Git and an activist who works with Rabbis for Human Rights, offers his services as a translator…. According to Sadah, after settlers threw rocks at olive harvesters at the nearby Farateh village, he and some Israeli volunteers guarded the groves….

Three days ago, three armed settlers came to the entrance of the village, attacked a group of harvesters and threw everything they had harvested in every direction.

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