On October 16th, a group of 32 international volunteers was interrupted while helping Palestinian farmers pick olives outside the village of Burin in the occupied West Bank. “The Israeli army arrived in a white van, and the farmers said we must leave,” one of the activists, who requested to remain anonymous, told Jewish Currents. The activists quickly moved into a farmer’s home. But according to Ghassan Najjar—a Burin resident who helps coordinate the annual olive harvest—the military, along with armed settlement officials from nearby Yitzhar, followed them inside and raided the house. At the insistence of settlement forces, the military called the police, who claimed that the area had been designated a closed military zone and proceeded to arrest all 32 activists. The volunteers, who came from across the United States and Europe and ranged in age from twenties to eighties, were taken to the police station in the settlement of Ariel. Over the next five days, they were transported to prison and then deported.

Najjar said this mass deportation of international activists, the largest ever apart from the expulsions of those aboard the recent Gaza solidarity flotillas, shows the extent of coordination between settler bodies and Israeli government officials. According to the Religious Zionist news site Srugim, it was settlement forces that initially noticed the activists. Settlers reached out to the head of their local governing body, the Samaria Regional Council; the head of the Council then contacted top military personnel as well as the Minister of the Interior, demanding deportations. Soon after the deportation decision was made, settlers loudly celebrated it as a win. On October 18th, Member of Knesset Tzvi Sukkot, a settler who has been arrested numerous times for violence against Palestinians, posted on Facebook that “this mass expulsion will, God willing, send a clear and unmistakable message to anyone thinking of coming here into the area to smear Israel through planned, violent provocations.” In an interview with Jewish Currents, Sukkot reiterated this sentiment. “These are people who come to bait, to provoke, to create a distorted picture of reality,” he said, adding that he was “certainly proud of” the campaign to deport them. That effort has only grown in the past days, with Israeli police arresting an additional 11 activists in Burin on October 29th and moving to deport the two in the group who were on tourist visas.

The arrest of international activists is a small part of Israel’s sprawling war on the Palestinian olive harvest. For decades, and especially in the past few years, Israeli settlers, soldiers, and government leaders have all targeted the harvest due to its economic and cultural importance across Palestine. In Gaza, Israel has destroyed an estimated one million olive trees in its bombardment, an assault leading experts have called a genocide. Meanwhile, less than two weeks into this year’s West Bank harvest, Israeli settlers have carried out over 150 increasingly violent attacks against harvesters. Settlers have stolen olives and damaged equipment; cut down and burned olive trees, destroying whole groves; and regularly teamed up with soldiers to prevent farmers from reaching their trees. “It has become a long-standing tradition during the olive-picking season for settlers to do everything they can to prevent Palestinians from enjoying their agricultural produce,” said Lea Tsemel, a human rights lawyer who represented the arrested activists.

In response, the harvest has become a time of particularly intensive protective presence, a practice wherein outside activists join Palestinian hosts in the hopes that their presence will decrease violence, or that they will at least be able to document attacks. Multiple Palestinian, Jewish, international, and Israeli groups have launched such initiatives in coordination with local communities, helping to produce media and human rights reports about settler and state attacks, bringing international diplomats to the field, and otherwise attempting to put Israel’s abuses in the spotlight. Coming amidst growing criticism of Israeli violence, these efforts have incensed Israeli settlers and leaders. “Israelis now feel isolated from the world because people have started to know the truth; they’ve started to know exactly what the settlers are doing here,” Najjar told me. This concern has given rise to an escalating Israeli campaign to hinder activists’ participation in the harvest, as well as the harvest itself, by smearing both as “terrorist” activities and calling for arrests and deportations. In light of this mobilization, human rights experts say that the recent wave of deportations may be only the beginning of a bid to radically curtail the role of activists in the area. In Tsemel’s words, “it’s an attempt to prevent the presence of anyone who could be a witness.”

Israel’s alarm over international activists in the West Bank started growing in the aftermath of October 7th, as skyrocketing settler violence began drawing global scrutiny. In March 2024, Sukkot launched a series of Knesset hearings on activists in the West Bank as part of the Subcommittee on Judea and Samaria, which he heads. Attended by military, police, and government top brass, as well as right-wing NGOs, the five such hearings to date focused on the ways that, in Sukkot’s words, foreign activists were “do[ing] everything in their power to obstruct our just war.” Much of this panic concerned activists’ efforts to bring attention to settler violence: At one of the hearings, a representative of Im Tirzu accused activists of “releasing false reports to the International Criminal Court” and of bringing diplomats to the West Bank, while at another, far-right Jewish Power Member of Knesset Limor Son Har-Melech complained that activists “blacken Israel’s name around the world.” “Ultimately, the campaigns against Israel and the sanctions come from them,” Sukkot said in September 2024. Therefore, Israel must work on “weeding them out one by one.”

Such calls to “weed out” activists have been accompanied by the creation of concrete enforcement structures. In early April 2024, the far-right minister Itamar Ben-Gvir set up a special unit within the police to handle foreign activists arrested in the West Bank. The unit—which was established soon after the Biden administration began implementing sanctions against violent settlers and settler organizations, and was reported to be in direct response to this move—carries out its work in cooperation with the Population and Immigration Authority (PIA) because of the organization’s low threshold for revoking visas. As a result, the unit has been able to swiftly enact deportations: According to data provided by the Human Rights Defenders Fund, 16 international activists were expelled from the country in the months following the start of Sukkot’s hearings and Ben-Gvir’s special unit. Similar trends have held when it comes to Israel denying people entry into the country: The Religious Zionist publication Arutz Sheva reported that only 30 left-wing activists were refused entry to Israel between 2017 and early 2024, whereas the first five months of 2025 alone saw over 100 refusals. “Many discussions in which we worked to connect the relevant bodies and actors finally bore fruit,” Sukkot said of the increase. “The special staff set up by Ben-Gvir . . . together with cooperation that we led between the PIA, the Ministry of the Diaspora, and the Central Command, led to a rise of thousands of percent [sic] in the refusal of entry of these hostile actors into Israel.” “Our message is clear,” Sukkot concluded. “The State of Israel will not be a playground for de-legitimization activists.”

These policies often lead to certain areas being arbitrarily marked as off-limits to both Palestinians and those accompanying them. “Across the West Bank, there are many places that are simply closed—huge swathes of land where access just isn’t permitted,” said Qamar Mashriqi, a human rights lawyer who works to protect Palestinian land rights in Masafer Yatta. Such practices are in direct violation of a 2006 Israeli Supreme Court ruling stating that the military cannot prevent Palestinians from accessing and working their land, as well as the Israeli military’s own stated commitment to following the court’s ruling. Documents obtained by Jewish Currents show that in a May 2024 response to the court, the military acknowledged that “the fact of arriving with activist accompaniment cannot be considered a provocation or a reason for declaring a closed [military] zone.” This position was reaffirmed in a September 2025 Civil Administration document released ahead of the olive harvest, also obtained by Jewish Currents. But Avi Dabush, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights—which organizes daily protective presence during the olive harvest—has told +972 Magazine that activists with his group have nevertheless been prevented from accessing olive groves almost every day this season. As Yonatan Pollak, a veteran Israeli activist who helps to coordinate protective presence during the harvest, noted to Jewish Currents, “this is a clear case of how reality and stated policy are two completely different things.”

Since this year’s harvest began, that reality has become more and more violent. In a particularly horrific incident on October 19th, the first day of the local olive harvest, over 100 settlers attacked farmers in Turmus Ayya, beating international activists with clubs and leaving a Palestinian woman with a brain bleed and 18 stitches in her head. The event was captured on video by the American journalist Jasper Nathaniel and received millions of views. Two days later, a settler on an ATV drove among the olive harvesters, asking people for their names and photographing them, and a few hours later, the military announced that only people from Turmus Ayya were allowed to stay in the fields. “They were looking for the activists. They wanted the activists to leave the area so they wouldn’t witness any intimidation or attacks from settlers,” Yaser Alkam, a landowner in Turmus Ayya who serves as the head of the foreign relations department in the local municipality, told Jewish Currents. Both Nathaniel and Alkam believe the attempt to root out the activists was due to the attention the video of the attack two days earlier had received. “All the soldiers and police officers seemed very upset about all this publicity they’re getting,” Nathaniel said. “It’s clear that they understand the bad optics, and they are trying to clean it up.” The same pattern unfolded the next day, when Alkam went to harvest his olives along with Dutch journalists. The same settler came through on his ATV to intimidate people and, Alkam said, “saw the cameras, the journalists taking videos of him.” Soon after, the military came and declared a closed military zone, forcing both the journalists and Alkam to leave.

Palestinians in nearby areas report a similar situation. Najjar, of Burin, said that there had been many cases this season of the military declaring closed military zones and forcing internationals to leave. “Many times over the last two months, the Shin Bet [the internal Israeli security police] have called me and threatened me and told me not to bring internationals,” Najjar said, noting that this is the first year that he has received threats concerning activists. In Masafer Yatta, too, where the majority of olive trees are now under closed military zone orders for the entirety of the olive harvest season, there is concern that Israel will restrict activists. In a recent message, the settler-led South Hebron Hills Regional Council has told residents that “only land owners who can prove their ownership will be permitted to take part in the olive harvest. The entrance of outside actors or anarchists will not be permitted.” The message went further, clarifying precisely what was concerning the settlers. “On entry to the olive harvest,” it noted, “there will be a security check and mobile phones must be deposited.” Such directives show that “they do not want the word to spread,” said Najjar. “They do not want anything that goes on in those areas to be documented.”

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