Israeli settlers just launched a coordinated wave of attacks on olive farmers

Israeli settlers have launched a coordinated wave of attacks on Palestinians across the occupied West Bank today.

It's happening right in the middle of the olive harvest.

So who's tracking this? The Colonisation and Wall Resistance Commission, a Palestinian body that monitors settlement activity.

It says settlers attacked olive harvesters, burned trees, stole crops and livestock, and attacked residents who tried to stop them.

And the spread is the thing to notice.

Harvesters were attacked in six villages at once: Jurish, Beita, An-Nakura, Birzeit, Deir Ibzi and Fara'ata.

In Tell, settlers burned a vehicle during an assault on farmers. In Qusra, they uprooted more than fifty olive trees. Settlers opened fire in Deir Ballut. A farmer was wounded in Kafr ad-Dik.

In Birin, in the al-Khalil governorate, settlers set dogs on farmers harvesting olives.

One dog bit a seventy-nine-year-old Palestinian woman on the upper thigh. She was taken to hospital by ambulance with moderate injuries.

Farid Burqan, head of the Birin Village Council, says the settlers came from Adorin, a recently built outpost on Palestinian-owned land in Khallat al-Furn.

Overnight into this morning, in al-Mughayyir in the Jenin governorate, settlers cut down around a hundred olive trees. Each one was about eight years old. The land belongs to Jamal Amin Abu Mweis.

In Yabrud, in the Ramallah governorate, settlers surrounded a Palestinian man's car, attacked him and his child, and stole the vehicle. Video from the scene shows two settler-driven cars blocking the family in.

Near Ein Qiniya, west of Ramallah, armed settlers took sheep that belonged to a Palestinian resident. Israeli forces stood by and stopped him approaching his own animals.

In Deir Ibzi, also west of Ramallah, settlers attacked Palestinian residents and the international activists working beside them. They forced everyone off the land. The harvest there stopped for the day.

The commission says quote "the recurrence of these attacks... reinforces an environment of coercion intended to prevent Palestinians from benefiting from their land".

So that's a Palestinian monitoring body saying Israeli forces are standing alongside the settlers, not just failing to stop them.

Arab News reports that the military's position is that it does what it can to clamp down on settler violence. Palestinians reject that, and point to repeated cases where soldiers stood by as attacks played out. No Israeli government or military statement has addressed today's attacks specifically.

And here's what led here. Two days ago, Ali Hassan Yasser al-Bazzari, forty-four, from the village of Burqa northwest of Nablus, died during a settler attack on olive farmers. The Palestinian Ministry of Health says he was killed and nine others were injured, one critically, as a result of an assault by occupation forces and settlers.

Witnesses say Israeli soldiers were there and protected the settlers during the attack. It still isn't established whether al-Bazzari was killed by settler or army fire.