Sinjil, West Bank — It’s been almost a year since Hosam Aida, 70, set foot in some of his his olive groves in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The Palestinian-American had been set to start his harvest in October 2023, but when he tried to access his land after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack, Israeli soldiers stopped him.
“They told me, because they are in a war, they said, ‘Well, you get out of here, or otherwise we can shoot you right there,'” Aida said.
It was harvest time again when CBS News met Aida at his home in Sinjil, in the middle of the West Bank, in early October 2024. With Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza still raging and fueling violence in the West Bank, he wasn’t even going to try to reach his olive trees.
Aida said he’d normally hire laborers to help him with manual labor, “but I’m not going to take that chance to let them [Israeli forces] kill them, because they kill anybody who’s there. They shoot them right away.”
How life has changed in the West Bank since Oct. 7, 2023
Since Hamas and other militants killed some 1,200 people in the Oct. 7 attack, there’s been a marked increase in violence against Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers. Between the day of the attack and the middle of September 2024, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs documented around 1,360 attacks by settlers against Palestinians. In that time, OCHA said 1,628 Palestinians, including 794 children, were displaced by incidents involving Israeli settlers.
The Israeli army has also commandeered some land near its bases in the occupied West Bank, according to the monitoring group Peace Now, and illegal Israeli settlements have expanded, many in agricultural land owned by Palestinians.
Aida told CBS News he’d lost parts of his properties to both the Israeli army and to settlers.
“Israeli settlers can attack Palestinians, steal their property, take over their land with almost total impunity, and the willingness of most Israelis to either think about this and care about this has been completely annihilated post October 7th,” Sarit Michaeli, international advocacy lead for the Jerusalem-based rights group B’Tselem, told CBS News.
Peace Now says the Israeli government — the country’s most far-right since World War II — has continued funding West Bank settlement expansion despite those settlements and outposts being considered by many illegal under international law, and amid pressure from the U.S. to stop their growth.
Over the last year alone, Peace Now said it had documented at least 40 new illegal outposts in the West Bank, mostly on farmland. Dozens of new roads have been paved to facilitate the establishment of these outposts, the group said.
The only way Aida can see his olive trees now is from a distance, but he said he wasn’t leaving.
“I have the right to go to [the] United States. I have my American passport. I have all my kids born in the United States, but I’m not going to leave my lands,” he told CBS News. “I’d rather die in my land before they take it.”
Julia Ingram and
contributed to this report.
