On November 12, 2025, Aysam Jihan Ma’alla died in the West Bank. He was 13 years old Testimony from a volunteer during the olive harvest in the West Bank

Anna Haunimat, 17/11/2025

Translated by Tlaxcala

Aysam, who had been in a coma for a month, died as a result of an attack by Israeli settlers and the intervention of the Israeli army using tear gas in Beita. Aysam Jihad Ma’alla was 13 years old; he was helping his family harvest olives alongside other farming families. He was not in Gaza. He was in Zone B in the West Bank, an area that was supposed to be fully returned to the Palestinians five years after the Oslo Accords (1993), but which remains under the civil control of the Palestinian Authority and the military control of the occupying forces.

“Geography is destiny”

—Ibn Khaldun

I left at the beginning of October 2025 for the West Bank to take part in the Harvest Zeytoun campaign with UAWC (Union of Agricultural Work Committees). The UAWC, headquartered in Ramallah, is an organisation that supports farmers in the West Bank. It was founded in 1986 and is affiliated with Via Campesina.

This Harvest Campaign has been renewed for several years and

aims to enable Palestinian families to secure their olive harvests thanks to the presence of international volunteers in the face of continuous attacks from Israeli settlers. “BAQA” (بقاء) — an Arabic word meaning “to stay” — symbolising steadfastness, rootedness, and resistance in the face of occupation and settler violence, is the name given to this campaign.

These attacks aim first and foremost to terrorise Palestinian farming families, preventing them from harvesting olives and pushing them to abandon their land. An “Israeli law” states that land not cultivated for two years is transferred to the occupying forces (+ 5,200 hectares confiscated by Israel between 08/10/2023 and 08/08/2025). The aim is also to make these lands unusable, in this case, the olive groves. Centuries-old olive trees or newly planted ones are uprooted and burned by settlers.

Violent and daily attacks by settlers against Palestinian families have intensified over the past three years (3,041 incidents, including 150 fatal ones, between 8/10/2023 and 8/08/2025).

52,300 olive trees have been destroyed in Gaza and the West Bank since 7 October 2023.

On 16/11/2025, according to the official Palestinian news agency WAFA, Ibrahim al-Hamed, Director General of Agriculture in Salfit, stated that 135 olive trees, at least seven years old and belonging to three farmers, had been uprooted in the Qana Valley within the locality of Deir Istiya. In the first eight months of 2025, the Israeli army issued orders to cut down trees over an area of 681 hectares in the occupied Palestinian territories. The October report from the Council on Israeli Violations indicates that, with the support of the Israeli army, settlers uprooted or damaged 1,200 olive trees on Palestinian land. [source]

The almost systematic destruction of olive trees by settlers deprives Palestinians of one of their essential resources. But it also contributes — since the establishment of the Zionist project in Palestine — to the fabrication of a myth: a land without people, an empty land. Since 1948, erasing all traces of prior presence has been a constant (nearly 500 villages were razed in 1948, 780,000 people expelled from their lands, without the right of return).

We volunteers, who set out hoping to try to slow this infernal machine of destruction, left every morning in small groups to help families with the harvest. Days without settler intervention forcing us to abandon the olive groves were rare. But when it was possible, it was a celebration! Finishing the harvest, eating together, sometimes even dancing.

But often too, we had to work quickly and in silence, like little ants trying to elude the settlers’ vigilance and finish before their attacks. On Thursday 16 November, we went to an olive grove near Huwara with a municipal councillor; once again we were attacked and chased away by settlers and the army. We then moved to another olive grove at the entrance to Burin, located right by the roadside, opposite the owner’s house. The army arrived very quickly and ordered us to leave, which we did, and we went to the farmer’s house, where he offered us coffee, tea, and pastries. The army entered his courtyard, claiming that we had violated a military zone.

After an hour, the army returned with a map indicating that this olive grove — including the farmer’s house — had been declared a military zone that very morning. This map, produced after a short while, showed how colonisation advances quietly: declaring land as military zones, confiscation, dispossession, and then the establishment of settlers on that same land.

During the absurd discussions with the army, I spoke with the owner and his wife. Seeing her embroidered headband and admiring its beauty, she called her daughters. They arrived with magnificent embroidered dresses, a belt embroidered with the names of Palestinian cities, and showed us the website of their shop filled with beautiful embroidered garments. 

We were “talking clothes,” in a sense, while the army penned us in their courtyard. She explained: “For us, this is every day. They enter, search the house claiming we are terrorists, sometimes arrest us. We can live with everyone — Christians, Jews, Muslims — but them, no, they don’t want to. They want to be alone on our land, that’s why they chase us away.” Then the police arrived; we were taken away after being thoroughly filmed by a settler, the army, and the police. I hugged tightly these women who embroider their history. In the bus, a female soldier explained that this woman was a terrorist, that I had hugged a terrorist, that her whole family was, including the little boy who had served us coffee and tea and taken care of us. Then I joined my comrades on the bus; the owner and another farmer were also arrested. That bus ultimately took us — after three interrogations, fingerprinting, photographs, a trip to the Jordanian border, a stop at border police, and finally to Givon prison — from which we were only released on Tuesday 21 October in the morning, accused of violating a military zone, participating in a terrorist group, and disturbing public order. We later learned the two farmers were also released the same day, though we never knew where they had been held.

If this is indeed an economic strategy to suffocate the Palestinian economy in the West Bank, it is just as much about fuelling the historical lie forged by Zionism and its Western allies: “Palestine was a desert; we made it a garden.” The reality is quite different: instead of an orchard, they have made it a hell.

The luminous landscapes, orchards, terraced fields with dry-stone walls cover the hills and valleys and their inhabitants. In the Qana Valley, for example, one reaches the olive groves by a stony path (because the road is forbidden by the settlers), walking through fields of orange, lemon, and pomegranate trees, and beehives, where a few goat herds still pass.

A farmer from the Palestinian Communist Party whom we helped with the olive harvest pointed to a stone house on the opposite hillside where he lived before 1967, the date of the Israeli occupation forces’ invasion. He explained that before the invasion he held a Jordanian identity card because the territory was under Jordanian mandate. It was confiscated by the occupation forces on the day of the invasion. “Jordan fought for one day,” he told us, “then they left and abandoned us under Israeli bombardment.” Since then, the settlements have multiplied, and “we live under the permanent threat of the settlers,” he said, pointing to the buildings that cover the hilltops, spreading like a gangrene impossible to eliminate.

I was in the olive groves in Beita on 10 October, alongside Palestinian families and dozens of other international volunteers. I witnessed one of these attacks. So I write now in urgency so that Aysam’s death at 13 years old does not become just another number added to an endless list. It will not be the last, I know. Others have already died since. Other Palestinians will continue to die under settler attacks and interventions by the occupying armed forces. And other Palestinians will remain on their land, as they have done for millennia.

During these attacks, in a brief lull, I kept helping a Palestinian family gather olives, putting them into sacks, talking with a woman. I asked her in rudimentary English what she thought of the ceasefire in Gaza. After laughing and saying, “Your English is broken!”, she calmly continued picking olives and said: “They have never respected a single agreement; they will not respect this one.” Then the settlers attacked again. This time, more numerous, more violent. They came charging down the hills screaming, stoning, shooting, burning cars. Children were shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and their voices echoed from hill to hill, as if their cries could push back the savagery in which they were born.

Cries against massacres, cries to protect their land, their brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers. Cries to defend themselves from a barbarism which, since 1948, has taken their families, homes, harvests, engulfed their land, and spewed death under the indifferent, sometimes falsely embarrassed, often accusatory gaze of Western eyes urging them to be silent, to disappear quietly, silently, above all.

As soon as the settlers began running down the hills, the army — which had positioned itself between the settlers and us — immediately fired tear gas at us.

Aysam inhaled the gas. It killed him.

The Palestinians, trying to protect us, asked us to withdraw. Hastily gathering a few more olives and filling a few more sacks, we began to leave — reluctantly, but we did. As we left, and as a fellow volunteer told me, “We are leaving; they remain,” rickety cars full of Palestinians arrived, trying to slow the frenzied settler attacks.

That day, settlers burned about ten cars, overturned an ambulance, and injured more than 35 people, including a Palestinian photojournalist and AFP correspondent [[Jaafar Ashtiyeh]. So I am writing now, to tell a little of what I saw — after many others, certainly — because yes, even if all this changes nothing, “something will have to be done,” as Éric Vuillard put it in a recent book.

Aysam was 13 years old. He is already no longer the last victim of the atrocities committed by a criminal state conceived by states born of genocide and/or complicit in them for centuries. But he will also be part of a long list of faces, of lives that do not give in, that refuse to surrender, that do not sell out, that continue to shout to the world that they will live. That the olive trees will bloom again, that the harvest will be beautiful, and that the oil will be green and bright like the land that produced it.

May these words be as many indelible stains, blood red, tattooed on the disdainful, still haughty, and inhuman foreheads of the genocidaires and their accomplices around the world.