Lebanon’s lost olive season: harvesting olives under drones and warplanes

Beirut, Lebanon – Every year, Khaled Farhat tends to his olive trees in the southern village of Majdel Selm, a task carried out year after year amid the din of war.

“I own an olive grove with about 200 trees. I tend to them in my spare time whenever I’m not on duty at the school,” he told Al Jazeera by phone.

This year, reaching his olive grove, which is just a 20-minute drive from the border with Israel, is more complicated due to the ongoing Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. His town of Majdel Selm lies just north of Israel’s “Yellow Line”, below which the Israeli military is demolishing homes and local infrastructure.

To reach his land, Farhat said, he had to request access from his local municipality, which forwarded the request to the Lebanese Army. The army then coordinates with a mechanism established after June’s Tripartite Framework Agreement between the United States, Israel and Lebanon to get permits for locals to tend to their olive groves.

American University of Beirut’s Ramy Zurayk, a professor specialising in landscape design and ecosystem management, said the widespread damage to farms and buildings in southern Lebanon, along with restrictions on movement, is an attempt by Israel to make the area “sterile”.

“The Israeli project is to eliminate humans and living organisms from the land,” Zurayk told Al Jazeera. “They are doing this via a variety of methods, including destroying the habitat and the components of the landscape that provide life, which destroy the relationship between the people and this land.”

Many of the border areas’ olive trees have been burned to the ground or uprooted by Israeli bulldozers. Lebanon’s Environment Minister Tamara Elzein said more than 16,000 hectares (about 40,000 acres) of land have been torched since Israel began bombing, and later invading, Lebanon in October 2023, including through the use of white phosphorus, a highly flammable substance.

Israel continues to occupy nearly 630sq km (243sq miles) of southern Lebanon, which includes swaths of farmland and dozens of villages.

In areas where the olive groves are still intact, Israel’s occupation has complicated this season’s harvest. Farmers and landowners say they work with Israeli drones flying overhead and live with the fear of unexploded ordnance on the ground. An hour earlier, an Israeli shell had landed near Farhat.

“Drones are constantly in the sky. You look up and see one, two, three of them sometimes just moving back and forth,” Farhat said. “Warplanes sometimes pass by and carry out strikes nearby, taking a toll on us psychologically and emotionally.”

Permission to access own land

Israel has placed tight restrictions on Lebanese farmers’ access to their land, which has cost them their crops. Farhat said he was given just a two-week window to work his land, and the neglect of his farmland is already evident.

“Usually, there shouldn’t be any weeds. But since the time for tilling and clearing the land happened during our displacement, we weren’t able to clear it. The land remained as it was because we couldn’t reach it,” he said.

“We’re in the middle of the harvest now. If we manage to finish harvesting everything directly from the trees within this timeframe, then great. Otherwise, whatever remains will go unharvested.”

The time spent clearing these weeds eats into the limited time he has to pick his olives. But they could also conceal a deadly surprise. Farmers and landowners said working their lands in the south is rife with unexploded ordnance, including from cluster bombs.

In early October, at least two people were killed in olive groves in south Lebanon. A retired soldier was killed in Yater village in the Bint Jbeil district by Israeli artillery fire. Another young man, who worked as an engineer, was killed when Israeli ordnance exploded while he was harvesting olives in the village of Froun, also in Bint Jbeil. A day later, a member of Lebanon’s police force tending to farmland in the southern village of Ain Ebel, a predominantly Christian village, was also killed in an explosion.

“There is a constant fear of being targeted [by Israeli attacks], especially in areas near the sites of attacks, as well as the risk of encountering cluster bombs or other remnants of war, which pose a grave danger to human life,” Hicham Hoteit, a journalist and olive farmer from Babliyeh town in south Lebanon, told Al Jazeera.

Explosives have been a recurring problem for farmers in southern Lebanon since the final days of the 2006 war, when Israeli forces dumped cluster bombs containing between 2.6 and four million submunitions in the area, according to a Human Rights Watch report.

“One of the biggest challenges we’ve seen in southern Lebanon since the 2006 war is how long cluster munitions continue to affect people’s lives long after conflict has taken place,” Hiba Ghandour, Lebanon’s programme manager for the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a nongovernmental organisation that aids communities affected by landmines, unexploded ordnance, small arms and light weapons, told Al Jazeera.

“Millions of submunitions were scattered across the region, including farmland, and many failed to explode on impact. They were left hidden in fields, olive groves and orchards – many of which we are still clearing today.”

According to a 2022 Lebanese Mine Action Center (LMAC) report, the government announced that much of the contaminated land had been cleared. “The Lebanese government announced that only 5 million square metres of land remained contaminated with cluster munitions [18 percent of the baseline to be cleared],” Ghandour said, citing the report.

“Since October 2023, the situation has become more complex. The latest hostilities have added a new layer of explosive hazards.”

Ghandour said MAG had identified 444,000sq metres of confirmed hazardous areas for farmers, but with research still ongoing, this figure is likely to rise significantly.

Despite these dangers, Lebanon’s dire economic situation has pushed many Lebanese to work their lands out of necessity.

“In our experience, clearing agricultural land is especially challenging, as the contamination can be concealed within vegetation or beneath soil, which takes us longer to clear,” Ghandour said.

“When people are under pressure to earn a living, they often feel they have no choice but to return to their land before it has been made safe, making clearance all the more challenging. Repeated bombardment has also damaged agricultural land and made it harder for our clearance teams to reach some of the communities most in need.”

Political analyst Bassel Doueik told Al Jazeera that many Lebanese citizens have been harassed by Israeli forces and barred from harvesting their olive trees.

Doueik used Kfarshouba, a predominantly Sunni border village, as an example. On Monday, he said, about 200 Israeli soldiers entered Kfarshouba and searched houses in several neighbourhoods, while at least three Merkava tanks and other military vehicles infiltrated the area around the village.

Hope for a better future

The widespread use of white phosphorus has led some Lebanese to hesitate buying produce from the south over concerns that it could be exposed to hazardous chemicals.

Zurayk, the AUB academic, said in a panel hosted at his university on October 21 that the panic was unfounded and there was no evidence that any of the olives or other produce from south Lebanon was dangerous to consume.

For many in Lebanon, including in areas beyond the south, harvesting olives is serious work but is also an opportunity for their families or communities to come together.

Many people with farmland across south Lebanon have said this year, due to the threat of Israeli attacks, they will leave their children and other relatives behind when they head to their crops. Back in Majdel Selm, Farhat said the dangers are evident in the south this harvest season.

“People hear that the situation is dangerous, they hear that there is shelling, but for someone who is actually in the midst of the shelling, or living under it, it is certainly a different experience,” he said.

“The reality on the ground is something else entirely. Still, thank God, hopefully, this is just a phase that will pass. Hopefully, the situation will not escalate further and will begin to de-escalate and move towards something better.”