Hanan Abdel Rahman Abu Salama was 59. On 17 October she was harvesting olives in Faqqua – a village in the northern part of the West Bank, about 15km from Jenin – when she was fatally shot in the back. The Palestinian mother was on her own land; the shooter wore an Israeli uniform. Just a day earlier, a group of UN experts had urged the Israeli government to ‘refrain from interfering with this year’s olive harvest’, a critical income source for around 100,000 Palestinian families in the occupied territories, whose economy is collapsing.

This homicide is just one more episode in the unending litany of brutality consuming the West Bank, officially regarded by Israel as one of ‘seven fronts’ in its already year-long war. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), 728 Palestinians from the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) were killed by Israeli soldiers or settlers between 7 October 2023 and 14 October 2024 ‒ an exponentially higher number than the 83 in 2021 or 154 in 2022. Another 1,628 Palestinians have had to abandon their homes after their (...)

Full article: 496 words.

Akram Belkaïd is a journalist

(1) Hadi, elected in 2012, six months after the negotiated exit of his predecessor Ali Abdullah Saleh, initially took refuge in the port city of Aden before fleeing to Saudi Arabia this March.

(2) See Hicham Ben Abdallah El Alaoui, “The new Arab cold war”, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, February 2015.