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 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”. 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.
You look up and see one, two, three of them sometimes just moving back and forth,” Farhat said. Farhat said he was given just a two-week window to work his land, and the neglect of his farmland is already evident. 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. 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.
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