On Friday, 11 November 2022, at around 9:30 A.M., about 30 members of the a-Tamimi family went with volunteers to harvest olives in their grove, which lies about 200 meters from their home in the neighborhood of Jabal Jales, in downtown Hebron. The illegal outpost of Giv’at Gal was established right next to the grove. At around 11:00 A.M., several teenage settlers arrived at the grove and started throwing stones at the harvesters. The family members and volunteers tried to shelter behind the olive trees and continue their work.
After a while, the settlers stopped throwing stones but remained in the area. At around 12:30 P.M., a more than 10 other teenage settlers joined them, and the stone-throwing resumed with greater intensity. This time, the family members could not continue working and they called the police. They then retreated to a more protected area and sat down to eat lunch. At that point, about 30 adult settlers arrived, some of them armed, and tried to drive the harvesters away and steal the olives they had managed to pick.
The family and the settlers started shoving each other, and about 10 minutes later, soldiers and police officers arrived and removed the settlers. One of the officers suggested the family go home and said that if the settlers came back and attacked them, he would not be responsible. The officer also threatened to arrest the volunteers if they returned. The members of the a-Tamimi family collected their olives and left the grove without completing the harvest.
Riham a-Tamimi (35) spoke about the incident in a testimony she gave B’Tselem field researcher Manal al-Ja’bari on 16 December 2022:
On Friday, 11 November 2022, at around 9:30 A.M., about 30 people from the family – women, children and older men – went with Palestinian and foreign volunteers to pick olives on our land, next to which the outpost of Giv’at Gal was established. We picked olives until about 11:00 A.M., when about seven teenage settlers started throwing stones at us from the hill that has the outpost. We tried to hide behind the trees and continued harvesting.
At some point the stone-throwing stopped, but at around half past noon, more young settlers arrived, maybe 12, and they started throwing stones at us again, this time more intensely. We couldn’t hide anymore. We called the police and decided to stop working and have lunch before leaving. We found a safer spot and started taking out the food, but then suddenly, about 30 adult settlers arrived, some of them armed. We were terrified. Some of the women from the family took the children away towards Route 60. I stayed in the grove with my father, my brothers and the volunteers.
For about ten minutes, the settlers tried to steal the olives we harvested and my brothers tried to fight them off, until a police car and some soldiers arrived. The police moved the settlers away in the direction of the Giv’at Gal outpost. One of the officers took pictures of us and wrote down our names. He also took pictures of the volunteers’ ID cards and threatened to arrest them if they came back there. The officer told us he recommended we leave the area and that he would not be responsible for our safety if we stayed. We gathered all our equipment and the few olives we’d managed to pick. We threw away the food, which was covered in dirt, and went home.
We used to make enough olive oil to last us a year, but now we’re forced to buy oil and olives in the market. In recent years, we’ve barely managed to harvest our olives because of the settler attacks, and the police and soldiers don’t protect us.