Palestinians are using firewood from their family olive groves for cooking and heating as fuel runs out due to the ongoing Gaza conflict, Olive Oil Times wrote.
Health officials in Gaza estimate at least 30,000 Palestinians have been killed since Israel’s invasion, which came in response to an attack on 7 October when militants from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other groups killed 1,143 Israelis.
The start of the war coincided with the beginning of the olive harvest and, as a result, some locals had not had a chance to harvest olives in the struggle to secure their day-to-day living, the 14 March report said.
“Instead of [harvesting] olives, we are cutting any tree we can find to survive,” Shahd al-Modallal, a resident of Rafah in southern Gaza, told The Guardian.
Before fleeing his home city of Bani Suhaila in Gaza with his family, Palestinian Khaled Baraka told Al Jazeera he had cut down half the trees in the family orchard, including olive, lemon and orange trees, to provide firewood for family and neighbours, the 14 March Olive Oil Times report said.
“I was displaced… when Israeli tanks entered the city of Khan Younis, we were already having a hard time,” Baraka said. “My orchard and fields were next to our house and we had already started burning branches.”
Olives are a major agricultural crop in Palestine and have been cultivated for thousands of years on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.
Nearly half of the cultivated land in the West Bank and Gaza – an area of almost 41,900 ha – is planted with more than 10M olive trees, mostly local, drought-resistant cultivars such as the Souri and Nabali, and around 100,000 families in Palestine are estimated to rely on olive trees for their livelihoods, according to the report.
Palestine became the 14th member of the International Olive Council (IOC) in 2017.
According to the IOC, Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza, produced 23,000 tonnes of olive oil in the 2022/23 crop year.
Before the Israeli invasion, the IOC had estimated that Palestine would produce 12,000 tonnes of olive oil, a volume which was now unlikely to be reached due to the conflict, Olive Oil Times wrote.
