Palestinian farmers risk their lives to pick their olives

Between heaven and earth, this is a way of life in retreat. Great. The olive groves of the West Bank no longer a place of safety, but an increasingly brutal front line in a battle for land that the Palestinians are losing. This year's olive harvest has been marred by the highest number of attacks by hardline Israeli settlers against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank in 20 years of UN record-keeping. Easy to stumble across. Let's do it again. In a village north of Ramallah, we find wary Palestinians watching settlers across a valley. They tell us the settlers chased them away from their trees despite the presence of Israeli soldiers. And from here we've been able to see some Israeli soldiers engaging with the settlers but we also saw what appears to be tear gas fired by the soldiers into the valley where the pickers were and we've seen some cars since leaving the valley. Wala Zoran says her family was attacked by settlers in the same grove the day before Stealing their olives. We started running, but they were so close, everybody was hit with the stones, like my father, my sister. My cousin, who was trying to push us down so he can buy us time, he got shot in the leg, actually. Even though they were gathering their olives in short bursts and in a big group, afraid of an attack. It's so random and doesn't have any rules. You don't know where it could come from or much. And which intensity, which weapon, how, how many. Aida Barghouti, a widow, says she no longer brings her children with her. That the settlers have made Palestinians feel like thieves in their own land. They not allowed us any freedom. But we remain on this land. This our grandfather lands. How do you keep safe when you come out? When the come, the settlers, we run away. What do you want? They destroy everything. She shows us the direction from which they come. One settler call another settler to help them, to steal, to any things. That is occupation. The occupation is now nearly 60 years old. Israel still expanding settlements illegal under international law. Jewish extremists setting up strings of outposts from which to try to push Palestinians from their land. So confident they plant Israeli flags all along the main roads. Aid groups have charted more than 25 settler incidents a day during this harvest from vandalizing property to physical attacks. Relax. A major challenge for Palestinian first responders often blocked by Israeli checkpoints. The Red Crescent dispatchers tell us that they try to anticipate where the hot spots are and so right now we're trying to find one of the ambulances that they've pre-positioned. We don't find the ambulance we're looking for in the village of Abu Fala. Yalla Shabbat! But we do find distraught residents. Dozens of their olive trees vandalized just a few hours earlier by masked settlers. Still there, perched on a nearby hill. Self-appointed kings of a castle, not their own. Raji Raja wants us to see the damage. He is broken in the morning. This happened this morning? Yeah, in the morning. Before two or three hours. And they just come in with a saw? Yeah, yeah. We have over 100. Some of the villagers watching call us back. We're coming, we're coming. Hey, hey, hey, hey. The settlers are returning. Candidate! Candidate! Just being here gives you a sense of how quickly things can become really, really dangerous. The settlers saw us, they came back down the hill. People from the village came out to defend their groves. Activists joined the scene. People have been hitting their heads with rocks. Until Israeli soldiers arrive, using tear gas to scatter not the settlers, but the Palestinians. A few days later, the scene would repeat, but with more injuries. A Palestinian man picking olives with his mother and a photojournalist for a U.S. newspaper. Both attacked by settlers. There are other patterns. In Deir Jarrah, the men of the village are up early preparing for a second try at harvesting their olives. . We tried last week, Abu Asif tells us. He says. The settlers attacked us and stole our olives. We couldn't do anything. Thank you. This time, they've invited supporters from Israel and abroad in the hopes they might ward off further attacks along with volunteer paramedics, In case they don't, the Israeli military arrives and blocks the road before they can move. Ooh. What's going on here is that the Israeli soldiers are telling the journalists, the solidarity activists and the farmers trying to pick their olives. That they can't go any further, that it is now a closed military zone and that if they do go further, they'll be held responsible for their own actions. We can see that we are in large areas. It's a common practice, fueling the Palestinians' conviction that they're up against much more than what the Israeli prime minister has dismissed as the actions of juvenile delinquents. And this is actually the... Another part of the occupied territories, southwest of Bethlehem. Dror Etkes is an authority on Israeli settlements, taking us to see the impact of one decades-old settlement on three Palestinian villages, essentially turning them into enclaves. You never know whether you're going to reach your destination. Every soldier, every jeep. You can close your road, okay, and this is, of course, a result of 60 years of an engineered landscape. This area is one of, I would say, one of the most advancedly de facto annexed to Israel. This is a bypass road which was paved in the 1990s. Israel has installed gates that control Palestinian access to their own villages across the West Bank. That's in addition to military checkpoints, stationary or otherwise. Etkes says Israel's failure to curb settler attacks amounts to tacit approval by the government, encouraging violence by failing to stop it. He says Palestinians have little left to defend themselves with. The balance of power between Israel and the Palestinians has never been as unequal. We decide to return to Abu Falah, where we learn from residents that Israeli soldiers have taken over two empty houses in town. The army doesn't announce why it's there, says Abdullah Mura, but it's obvious they're there to protect the settlers. Everyone has a video, either of their own property or that of someone they know being attacked or harassed by settlers in the past. To act in self-defense, they say, risks arrest, injury or even death. In past instances, the Israeli army has said its soldiers are dispatched or closed military zones declared to prevent conflict. Palestinians say it's just one more way of removing them from their land, that the attacks on the olive harvest are part and parcel of an increasingly brutal occupation. Everyone is afraid of the future of children. We've never been so afraid for the future of our children, says Abdullah Mura, hearkening back to the days when the harvest used to be a time for celebration, making efforts to stop its slide towards nostalgia. To remain on the land more important than ever, they say.