UNRWA says October ‘on track to be the most violent month’ since it began tracking settler violence in 2013.
Published On 1 Nov 20251 Nov 2025
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Israeli settlers have carried out more attacks against Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, as the United Nations warned that this year’s olive harvest is on track to be the most violent in more than a decade.
The Palestinian official news agency Wafa reported several incidents of settler violence on Saturday, including in fields close to the towns of Beita and Huwara, near the northern West Bank city of Nablus, and in Sinjil, a town near Ramallah.
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Three Palestinian farmers also were wounded in al-Maniya, southeast of Bethlehem, after Israeli settlers opened fire on them as they were harvesting their olives.
Palestinians in the West Bank have experienced a surge in settler and military attacks since Israel launched its Gaza war in 2023. But this year’s olive harvest season, which began last month, has brought an even greater increase in violent incidents.
The UN’s agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) said on Saturday that October “is on track to be the most violent month since UNRWA began tracking settler violence in 2013”.
“The annual olive harvest is the primary livelihood for tens of thousands of Palestinians, with olive trees deeply rooted in Palestinian heritage and identity,” Roland Friedrich, director of UNRWA affairs in the West Bank, said in a statement shared on social media.
“Attacks on the olive harvest threaten the very way of life for many Palestinians and further deepen the coercive environment in the occupied West Bank,” Friedrich said. “Families should be allowed unhindered access to their lands to harvest their olives in safe conditions.”
According to the latest UN figures, released on Thursday, at least 126 Israeli settler attacks have been recorded in 70 Palestinian towns and villages so far this olive harvest season.
More than 4,000 olive trees and saplings also have been vandalised, the UN’s humanitarian office (OCHA) found.
Meanwhile, OCHA said that the expansion of illegal Israeli settlement outposts in the West Bank has “further undermined Palestinian farmers’ ability to reach their lands” to harvest their olive trees.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has been rapidly expanding settlement activity in the shadow of the Gaza war, drawing condemnation and warnings from the UN and international human rights groups.
Far-right Israeli politicians, including members of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, have also been pushing for Israel to formally annex the West Bank.
In July, the UN human rights office warned that escalating settler violence in the West Bank is being carried out “with the acquiescence, support, and in some cases participation, of Israeli security forces”.
Settler and military attacks “are part of a broader and coordinated strategy of the State of Israel to expand and consolidate annexation of the occupied West Bank, while reinforcing its system of discrimination, oppression and control over Palestinians there”, it said.
Israeli army and settlers have carried out 158 attacks against olive pickers since the start of the current season
Israel has ordered the deportation of 32 foreign activists supporting olive-harvesting Palestinian farmers amid mounting Israeli army and settler attacks in the occupied West Bank two weeks into the harvesting season.
Israeli news outlet Israel Hayom reported that the activists were arrested last week near the town of Burin, in the Nablus Governorate, as they protested an Israeli general order stating that only those working on the harvest are allowed on the land during the harvesting period.
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Israeli army and settlers have carried out 158 attacks against olive pickers since the start of the current season, according to the Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission.
The assaults included a range of violations, including beatings, mass arrests and shootings. At least 74 attacks targeted olive-growing lands, including 29 cases where trees and farmland were cut, bulldozed or uprooted. A total of 765 olive trees were destroyed.
The UN and rights groups have said Palestinian farmers face a heightened risk while gathering olives.
“Settler violence has skyrocketed in scale and frequency,” Ajith Sunghay, the head of the UN Human Rights Office in the Palestinian territory, said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Two weeks into the start of the 2025 harvest, we have already seen severe attacks by armed settlers against Palestinian men, women, children and foreign solidarity activists.”
The UN estimates that 80,000 to 100,000 Palestinian families rely on the olive harvest for their livelihoods, Sunghay said.
On Wednesday, a statement by Interior Minister Yariv Levin and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir stated that the activists would be deported over their alleged affiliation with the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC).
A 99-year entry ban was imposed on the activists, the statement said, without specifying their identities, nationalities or where they would be deported to.
Settler violence against Palestinians has worsened since the start of the war in Gaza.
More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces or settlers since October 7, 2023, in the occupied West Bank, according to the United Nations, and thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced due to Israeli settler attacks, movement restrictions and home demolitions.
The UN says the first half of 2025 has seen 757 settler attacks causing casualties or property damage – a 13 percent increase compared with the same period last year.
On Sunday, a settler attack in the town of Turmus Aya was captured on camera and showed Israeli settlers descending on Palestinian olive harvesters and activists and beating them with clubs. One woman was taken to the hospital with serious injuries.
At least 36 people, including journalists, were injured earlier this month when settlers attacked Palestinian farmers harvesting olives in the Jabal Qamas area of Beita, beating them and setting fire to three vehicles.
More than 700,000 settlers live in 150 settlements and 128 outposts – both illegal under international law – dotting the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Settlers are often armed and frequently accompanied or protected by Israeli soldiers.
In addition to destroying Palestinian property, they have carried out arson attacks and killed Palestinian residents.
However, she appears at peace with their difficult history now, re-sharing pictures Tom, 46, uploaded to Instagram from the premiere of Netflix‘s The Thursday Night Murder Club.
They featured a suited Tom linking arms with daughter Marnie, 12, who stood beside brother Flo, 17.
Tamzin added: “My heart is bursting #suchaproudmama [love heart emoji].”
READ MOR ON TAMZIN OUTHWAITE
The positive post was very different in tone from a tweet she posted in 2023.
It read: “Ten years since the father of my kids walked out on us for the final time. I still meet new people on jobs who reveal more infidelities and lies he committed.
“But thankfully my heart and soul are clear and clean and I could not be happier right now.”
After removing the post, the former EastEnders star explained: “Thank you all for your messages re my now deleted tweet.I was marking the 10 year anniversary with pride,a feeling of triumph & genuine gratitude.
“I understand it has triggered some people. For anyone struggling, the most important relationship you will ever have is with yourself.”
Last year Tamzin split from boyfriend of six years Tom Child. That relationship ended on much more civil terms, and she still refers to him as her “best friend”.
Tamzin Outhwaite reveals her eldest child is transgender on Parenting Hell podcast
She credited him with being supportive throughout her eldest child’s transition to identifying as a boy.
Tamzin said: “[He] has been around for the whole of like Flo’s transitioning period, for the whole of Marnie becoming a girl that was discovering all sorts of stuff and boys, and so he is still a member of the family. We’ve been not together for over a year.
“The kids often say to him ‘When you meet someone, or even if you have, how are you going to explain this situation to your girlfriends?'”
She’s in no rush to find a new man and hasn’t found datingapps to be fruitful.
Tamzin told The Sun last month: “I’m single, I’ve tried the dating apps. I’m on one now but I keep forgetting to check it.
“I just can’t imagine actually going on the date and going back to the small talk. It will happen one day but I’m certainly not waiting for it.
“I’ve been single for over a year now and I’m loving it too much.
“I owe it to myself to be single, because I haven’t been single for this long, ever. I have always been in relationships. I actually like being on my own, it’s really nice.”
Tamzin became a household name in 1998 when she joined the cast of the BBC’s EastEnders as Mel Owen, and went on to win several Sexiest Female awards as well as Best Actress.
She has also starred in army series Red Cap, crime drama New Tricks and played Rebecca Mitchell in drama Hotel Babylon.
Recently she played a recovering drug addict in ITV’s police series The Tower, and last year played sex-loving Sylvie in Channel 5’s six-part drama The Wives.
Tamzin says that after reading the script for The Wives, she overhauled her health and figure ready for the camera.
She said: “I lost weight before we started filming The Wives last February.
“I read that I was in a bikini a lot and a swimsuit. So, between Christmas and the New Year, I didn’t drink any alcohol and I exercised every day. I didn’t ever weigh myself, but I just knew I could fit into things that I didn’t used to.
“I went down a dress size. It took me six weeks. Now it’s just keeping it off.”
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Tamzin is still friends with her most recent ex, Tom ChildCredit: INSTAGRAM/TAMZIN OUTHWAITE
Israeli destruction in al-Mughayyir near Ramallah is part of push to forcibly displace Palestinians, researcher says.
The Israeli military has destroyed about 3,000 olive trees in a village near Ramallah in the occupied West Bank, the head of the local council says, as Palestinians face a continued wave of violence across the territory in the shadow of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The Israeli military issued an order on Saturday to uproot olive trees in a 0.27sq-km (0.1sq-mile) area in al-Mughayyir, a village of about 4,000 residents northeast of Ramallah.
The army justified the measure by saying the trees posed a “security threat” to a main Israeli settlement road that runs through the village’s lands.
The destruction was carried out as al-Mughayyir has been under lockdown since Thursday after an Israeli settler said he was shot at in the area.
The deputy head of the village council, Marzouq Abu Naim, told Palestinian news agency Wafa that Israeli soldiers had stormed more than 30 homes since dawn on Saturday, destroying residents’ property and vehicles.
For decades, the Israeli military has uprooted olive trees – an important Palestinian cultural symbol – across the occupied Palestinian territory as part of the country’s efforts to seize Palestinian land and forcibly displace residents.
The West Bank also has seen a surge in Israeli military and settler violence since Israel launched its war on Gaza in October 2023, and tens of thousands of Palestinians have been forced out of their homes.
Palestinian men collect wheat after an attack by Israeli settlers in al-Mughayyir in May [File: Mohammed Torokman/Reuters]
More than 2,370 Israeli settler attacks against Palestinians have been reported across the area from January 2024 to the end of July this year, according to the latest figures from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).
The highest number of attacks – 585 – was recorded in the Ramallah area, followed by 479 in the Nablus region in the northern West Bank.
At least 671 Palestinians, including 129 children, also have been killed by Israeli forces and Israeli settlers across the West Bank in that same time period, OCHA said.
The Israeli military did not immediately respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment on Saturday on the uprooting of the olive trees in al-Mughayyir.
Hamza Zubeidat, a Palestinian researcher, said the destruction is part of Israel’s “continuous” effort to force Palestinians off their lands.
“We have to be clear that since 1967, Israel is still implementing the same plan of evicting the Palestinian population from the countryside and the cities of the West Bank. What’s going on right now is just a continuous process of this eviction of Palestinians. It’s not a new Israeli process,” Zubeidat told Al Jazeera.
He noted that al-Mughayyir has a long agricultural history and, like other villages in the West Bank, relies almost entirely on agriculture and livestock as its main source of income.
“This area where more than 3,000 olive trees [were] uprooted is one of the most fertile areas in this part of the Ramallah area,” Zubeidat explained.
“Uprooting trees, confiscated water springs, blocking and preventing Palestinians from accessing their farms and water sources means more food and water insecurity.”
Aged seven or eight, planting onions on his father’s land above Kabak Bay, Fatih Canözü saw his first foreigner. Before the road came in 1980, his village on the jagged coast of south-west Turkey’s Lycia region was extremely remote, isolated by steep valleys and mountains plunging into the sea. It took his family two days to get to the city of Fethiye on winding donkey tracks, to sell their apricots, vegetables and honey at the market. Despite his shock at seeing the outside world intrude for the first time, Canözü remembers thinking even then that tourism was the future.
Four decades on and having trained as a chef, Canözü has not only built a restaurant and 14 tourist cabins in Kabak, he has married a foreigner too: a former Middle East correspondent from England, who came here to research a novel and ended up falling in love. Now they are raising their family on this wild fringe of Anatolia’s Turquoise Coast, a region that Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founding father of the Republic of Turkey, is said to have called the most beautiful in the country.
The Olive Garden takes its name from the 200 to 300 olive trees growing on the terraced hillside above the sea. Canözü’s father dug them up in the mountains and lugged them here on his back, a testament to the years of hard work it took to make this place. Canözü designed the cabins himself, building them in wood and stone to minimise the environmental footprint. Then he installed an infinity pool where his family once threshed grain. When the restaurant opened in 2005, he waited a nerve-racking 45 days for his first customer. Slowly, people came.
My wife and I stay here for four nights, sleeping first in a standard cabin and then in one of two luxury cabins overlooking the sea. The room is airy, glass and pine, but we spend most of our time sitting on the deck outside, continually astonished at the view. On the far side of the forested valley rise immense limestone walls that mark the southern reaches of the Taurus mountain range – the summit nearby is slightly lower than Ben Nevis. On the beach below, a sliver of sand meets startlingly blue water. Kabak beach has long been known for its alternative vibes, a place where groups of hippies sunbathe alongside Muslim families, women in burkinis and dogs dozing on the sand.
Food at the Olive Garden restaurant. Photograph: Louise Pamment
This sense of coexistence – something that many see as the heart of modern Turkishness – extends to the marine life: at sunset, half the beach is cleared for nesting loggerhead turtles.
By road, the village of Kabak is literally the end of the line, which, along with the rugged terrain, has helped shield it from the overdevelopment suffered by resorts elsewhere.
On foot, it is a resting place on a longer, slower journey. One of the things that brings travellers here is the 470-mile Lycian Way, established in 1999 by a British-Turkish woman called Kate Clow, who still lives locally. We hike sections of this world-renowned walking trail, first along a rocky path through pine forest and strawberry trees to visit a nearby waterfall. Some beach party stragglers have landed after a long night, so we take our plunge to the thump of techno. A few minutes’ scramble and the trail brings us back to wild silence.
The following day I walk south for two hours while others go ahead by boat; we meet on Cennet Koyu, which translates as Paradise Bay. No road has made its way to this beach, and it fully deserves its name. Swimming here, in water as clear as glass with steep green mountains rising behind, is as close to paradise as can be imagined. Up in the forest is one of the “camps” that were founded before gentrified tourism arrived – vaguely piratical travellers’ outposts that keep things reassuringly scruffy. Dogs, chickens and donkeys wander among the trees.
One of the cabins at Olive Garden. Photograph: Louise Pamment
The boat, steered by a local man with an anchor tattooed behind his ear, takes us around the next headland to the site of a ruined village. Its archway and collapsed stone walls, half swallowed by greenery, are a testament to the darker history of this stretch of coastline. Kalabantia was once inhabited by Greeks, forced to abandon their beautiful home during the brutal “population exchange” that followed the Turkish war of independence in the 1920s. No one came to take their place – it was too remote even for local Turks – so now its stones are sinking back into the land from which they came.
A 45-minute drive away is the much larger settlement of Kayaköy, formerly Levissi, from which over 6,000 Greeks were deported in 1923 to a “homeland” they had never seen. This melancholy ghost town of 500 roofless houses is almost entirely abandoned, but for roaming goats and tourists. There is something particularly tragic in its Orthodox chapels and churches, with their painted stars still pricking the ceilings. Strangely, I realise I’ve been here before: under the fictional name Eskibahçe, this was the setting of Louis de Bernières’ novel Birds Without Wings, which describes how nationalism tore apart multicultural communities that had lived side by side under Ottoman rule for centuries.
The Greek influence is also apparent in Lycia’s most famous ruins: the rock-carved tombs that we saw on our way here from Fethiye. They were made by the ancient Lycians, who blended Hellenic architecture with the Persian technique of hewing structures from the living rock. Smaller tombs, which resemble lidded caskets made of stone, are scattered throughout the mountains and along the Lycian Way, monuments to another of Anatolia’s vanished cultures.
Life has never been settled here. Kabak might still be remote but the road has inevitably brought change, and since the Olive Garden opened, trees have been bulldozed and concrete poured, although the pace of construction has apparently slowed in recent years.
Owner Fatih Canözü
With increasing visitor numbers, the water supply is a big concern, followed closely, in this time of ever-rising temperatures, by the risk of forest fires. But other things stay much the same. Where the road terminates the mountains are still vast and wild, the forests are still full of boar, and the turtles still return to the beaches every year. As in other places where beauty masks a harder existence, there’s a balance to be struck: without tourism – including the hikers slogging along the Lycian Way – many of Kabak’s young people would be forced to move elsewhere instead of working locally, as the Olive Garden’s staff do. At least for now, Kabak feels on the right side of that balance.
On our last night we eat imam bayildi, which translates as “the imam fainted” – presumably because the dish is so good – roasted aubergine stuffed with onions, tomatoes and garlic, drenched in olive oil and smothered with melted cheese. The food has been consistently fresh, local and delicious. The moon shines on the walls of the valley, which glow as bright as bone. We have learned a new word, yakamoz, my favourite in Turkish or any other language: it describes the sparkling of moonlight on dark water. There is poetry in this land. Any culture that has a word for this must be doing something right.
Standard cabins at Olive Garden Kabak (olivegardenkabak.com) from £70, luxury cabins £120 (both sleep two), breakfast included
