Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: olive oil

Showing posts with label olive oil. Show all posts

Thursday, November 26, 2020

Fisking @Oxfam: How important is the Palestinian olive harvest to its economy, and how much damage do "settlers" cause?

Oxfam put out this infographic:

Is the olive harvest season essential to the Palestinian economy?

Let's look at some of the statistics.

How important is agriculture to the Palestinian economy?

In 2016, agriculture contributed 3.16% of the Palestinian GDP. Which means that the olive harvest contributes less than one percent of the Palestinian economy.

If Oxfam cares about the Palestinian economy so much, they should be insisting that the PA stops paying terrorists and their families - an amount that is more than double the total olive oil revenue!

Let's do the math.

This means that each family's income from olive harvest is on $1480 a year.

The average Palestinian income for one worker is over $20,000 a year.

Which means that these 100,000 families are either starving or they make most of their money doing other jobs, and the olive harvest is a sideline that they only work on a small amount of the year. (In most cases, the husband has a regular job and the wife will spend a few weeks a year on the olive harvest to supplement their main income.)

At any rate, olive oil isn't the critical economic powerhouse that Oxfam pretends.

Now, what about the supposed huge number of vandalized trees by "settlers?" Oxfam claims 1475 trees damaged this year.

There are about 8 million fruit bearing olive trees in the territories. If 1475 of them were destroyed completely, that would come out to total damage worth of about $27,000.

The research and design for this poster probably cost Oxfam more than $27,000!

If you look at the categories of damage listed, you can see that most of the alleged damages still would allow harvesting of some olives, so the real damage is even less. The number of fruit bearing trees cut down completely is probably zero, since olive trees are extraordinarily difficult to cut down or uproot.

And Oxfam is relying on lies to even come up with these figures. In tiny, tiny type, it says - absurdly:

No, Oxfam, the actual incidents are definitely lower. The Palestinian Authority deliberately lies about the attacks by settlers - for example, often claiming that religious Jewish settlers are cutting down olive trees on Shabbat, or showing photos of obviously pruned olive trees and pretending that they were cut down by Jews.

The number 1475 is highly exaggerated, which means that the total damage from "settlers" is minuscule compared to the total yield.

And one more thing: even with all the terrible Israeli restrictions and settler violence alleged, somehow the olive crop last year broke all records.

This poster is a perfect example of lying with facts. Oxfam doesn't say anything that is not truthful here, but it gives an impression of widespread, massive damage to the Palestinian economy by "settlers" and Israel that is completely false.

(h/t Tomer Ilan)

UPDATE: There is no doubt that the dollar value of damage from Gaza firebomb balloons this year far outstrips the damage to olive trees. How much effort has Oxfam made against the firebombs?

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Jewish settlers again accused of chopping down olive trees - on Shabbat

Wafa and a whole bunch of other Arab sources report:

Settlers cut, today, Saturday, about 30 olive trees from Qaryut lands, south of Nablus.

The official in charge of the settlement file in the northern West Bank, Ghassan Douglas, told "Wafa" that settlers cut down about 30 olive trees in the town's lands, owned by Bilal Mahmoud Raja.

As I have shown before, Ghassan Daghlas is paid by the Palestinian Authority to make up lurid, completely fictional stories about Jewish settlers, and to tell them to the media.

This is not an exaggeration. It is his job, and he has been quoted in major media outlets who cannot believe that he is a professional liar.

In this case, as in virtually all the articles he is quoted in, there is no photographic evidence of the crime he is accusing Jews of doing.

Every article I saw about this absurd accusation, that the religious Jews of communities near Nablus would chop down trees on Shabbat, shows "archival footage" rather than any actual photos of the destroyed trees.

Even though every adult nowadays is walking around with a high resolution camera in their pocket, there are no photos.

That's truly amazing!

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"Pay for Slay" pays triple the total amount of olive oil revenue for Palestinians

This is the time of the year of the Palestinian olive harvest, and there are lots of stories and photos about how critical this time of year is to the Palestinian economy. Most of the olives are converted to olive oil.

How much is the annual olive oil yield in the West Bank? According to UN-OCHA, it is between $110 and $120 million a year.

Articles try to say how critical the olive oil business is the the Palestinian economy, with figures tossed around that it is the main income for 100,000 Palestinian families. Simple math shows that this is impossible because that would mean each family only has an annual income of $1200, when the average Palestinian family income is over $20,000. Clearly the olive oil industry is not nearly as large as we are told.

But there is another comparison that is useful. The annual budget in the Palestinian Authority to pay prisoners, "marytrs" and their families was $315 million in 2016 - meaning that the Palestinian Authority gives nearly triple the annual olive oil revenues to terrorists and their families every year.

The Palestinian leaders want the world to think that their top priority is the olive oil industry. Clearly paying terrorists and their families is a far, far higher priority.

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Palestinians again lie about "settlers cutting down olive trees" on the Sabbath

Palestinian media has dozens of stories about "Jewish settlers" cutting down some 40 olive trees in Al Mughayir, north of Ramallah.

The "settlers" were said to come from nearby Shiloh - on Saturday morning.

Shiloh is a religious Jewish community, and its residents wouldn't cut down trees on the Sabbath. (Cutting down 40 olive trees would take a great deal of time and effort.)

Not one of the articles showed any uprooted or damaged trees that were not archive photos. In an age when literally everyone carries a camera in their pocket, it is inconceivable that there would be no photos of this massive destruction.

And if the Palestinians are lying about this destruction of trees, how many other times are they lying about it as well?

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Oh, by the way: Palestinians had a record olive crop in 2019

From OCHA:

Record yield reported from 2019 olive harvest

There are over 10 million olive trees in the West Bank, on which between 80,000 to 100,000 families rely for their income, including large numbers of unskilled laborers and more than 15 per cent of working women. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the olive oil yield for the 2019 harvest, which took place between September and November, is estimated to be 27,000 tons, including some 4,200 tons of oil in Gaza: this represents an over 80 per cent increase compared to 2018.

The vast majority of the report is about how Israel is supposedly making life impossible for farmers - yet somehow they reached a new record of 27,000 tons of fruit harvested.

Also, given that there are over 10 million olive trees in the area, it shows that even if you believe their figures of some 8000 trees damaged or destroyed by "settlers" this year - a highly unlikely scenario, given how difficult it is to actually destroy an olive tree - it means that "settler damage" is minuscule, less than one tenth of one percent of all trees. Given how much time the UN and Palestinian media spends on breathless reporting of every tree supposedly attacked by Jews, it shows that the UN has little interest in actual crop yields and great interest in smearing Jews.

(h/t Irene)

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More bogus claims of "settlers" cutting down Palestinian trees - on Shabbat

The official Palestinian Wafa news agency says:

Settlers continued for the third day in a row, cutting down trees in the lands of Al-Khader, south of Bethlehem , raising the number of trees that were targeted cutting to 780 trees.

The youth activist in Al-Khader, Emad Da`dou, told our correspondent that today, Saturday, the settlers cut down 200 vine trees in the "Fagur" area belonging to Mohammed Ibrahim Abu Al-Kata'a .

All of the Jewish communities near Al Khader are religious - Givat Eitam, Givat HaDagan, Givat Hatamar.

The residents there would not be cutting down trees or vines on the Sabbath.

The photo that accompanies this story in one local Palestinian news site shows what are obviously pruned olive trees, not destroyed or uprooted trees.

The lies continue.

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Elder gets results, sort of (Haaretz edition)

In September, Haaretz' Gideon Levy and Alex Levac wrote an article saying that Israel was uprooting "hundreds" of olive trees, right before harvest!

Levac took a photo of one of them. Note the caption.

Regavim told me the entire story was bogus, and the trees that were uprooted were acacia saligna (coojong.)The acacias are a pest plant, hat spread quickly, planted by Palestinians for a land grab.

Who was telling the truth?

I asked Twitter what kind of tree was in the photo - taken by one of the authors. Everyone agreed it wasn't an olive tree, and some agreed it was acacia. I wrote up how Haaretz appears to be lying.

I just noticed that Haaretz corrected the caption, and even added a correction for the photo caption. But the article still claims that hundreds of olive trees were destroyed by Israel.

If one of the authors doesn't know what an olive tree looks like, why should we believe them about the other trees destroyed? No Palestinian news site showed photos of hundreds of destroyed olive trees.

Haaretz was caught in a lie, but only admitted the bare minimum it could.

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Gideon Levy's fake olive trees in Haaretz

Gideon Levy in Haaretz writes about how cruel Israelis are destroying Palestinian olive trees, seemingly for no other reason but to persecute their owners:

Two days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, on Tuesday last week, his intention to annex the Jordan Valley after the election, forces of the Civil Administration carried out yet another brutal operation of destruction. The target this time was particularly remote: a rocky hillside adjacent to the village of Tamoun in the northern valley. The goal was singularly vicious: the uprooting of hundreds of olive trees that were about to yield their first fruit...

Four days later, on Monday, the groves’ owners stood next to their felled trees and their ruined cisterns, sadly rolling bits of olives from the felled trees between their fingers. The first crop of these seven-year-old trees was set to be harvested in another few days, but the Civil Administration’s terminators got here just before – as if to rub salt in the wound. The butchered trees are withering on the ground; their fruit is dying on the slashed branches.

Here is the photo of the uprooted trees from the story:

There's only one slight problem. These aren't olive trees.

To be certain, I asked people on Twitter who know trees better than me, and it was unanimous - not one person identified these as olive trees. The color and shape of the leaves, the thickness of the trunk - all show that these are not olive trees and Levy's claim that they were cut down right before they were ready to produce fruit is simply not true.

But if they are not olive trees, what are they, and why is Israel uprooting them?

According to the Regavim NGO - who have a much better track record than Haaretz for telling the truth - these trees are acacia saligna trees, known as coojong (and other names.) They are the tree equivalent of weeds - invasive, non-indigenous, fast growing trees that disrupt the ecosystem and destroy the water table.

Regavim says that the PA plants these trees, considered pests throughout the world, because they grow like wildfire and give the appearance of "old" agricultural work at the site. This way they can take advantage of a loophole in Ottoman Land Law that gives squatters rights if they have been using the land for several years without any objections having been registered against them. Young, fast growing coojongs look like much older trees for their age, so they are ideal as a means for a land grab.

Israel is destroying the trees not only because the land they are planted on is state land, but also because the trees themselves are a threat to the ecosystem. The Palestinians, who claim to love their land so much, prefer to plant invasive, non-indigenous trees that are close to unkillable (their seeds can survive fire) and that destroys other plants.

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"Progressives" feel betrayed by Israelis visiting Cuba (plus has Israel uprooted 800,000 olive trees?)

Take out the violins.

From Mondoweiss:

Palestinian solidarity activists in North America are accustomed to being abandoned by many of their “progressive allies”, be it church officials or municipal councils or politicians. This is the sad reality of working in today’s political landscape, where opportunism runs rampant and the pro-Israel lobby has often succeeded in dominating the agenda with its relentless smear and intimidation campaigns. But the cut runs deeper and is profoundly more devastating when it is a long-time genuine ally that enables the Zionist settler colonialist narrative; such is the case with the recent visit of a Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF) delegation to Cuba and their presentation at a climate conference in Havana. A visit that besmirches the long history of joint struggle and solidarity between the Cuban and Palestinian peoples.

It is funny that the only place to find good news about Israel is in a virulently anti-Israel publication. As the good guys despair over the gains that seem to be made by the Israel haters, the haters are despairing more over how they have lost their previously-reliable allies!

_________________________

The article goes on to mention the statistic that Israel has cut down 800,000 olive trees since 1967. I have never found a valid source, it seems to be as bogus as the lie that Israel has imprisoned 800,000 Palestinians since 1967.

It links to the poster shown here from Visualizing Palestine. VP gives two sources for the statistic that Israel uprooted 800,000 olive trees in one of its well-designed and completely lying infographics. One is Oxfam, which mentions it in a fact-sheet yet gives no source. The other is an OCHA UN document, "Olive Harvest Factsheet 2011," which doesn't say what they claim it says. Neither does the 2012 document, the last time it was issued.

It is a made-up statistic.

Just as with the prison lie which gets accepted as truth in the UN, the olive tree statistic has been repeated by others as fact.

Without any actual studies to document the number, the 800,000 figure has to be considered a lie.

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Today's fake news from the Palestinian Authority

How Arab newspapers illustrate "Jewish settlers"

The official Wafa news agency has another scoop courtesy of Ghassan Daghlas, the man who is literally paid by the Palestinian Authority itself to make up lies about Jewish settler activity and yet gets quoted by major news sources dozens of times a year even though he never backs up his accusations with any actual evidence.

This time Daghlas claims that Jews not only uprooted over 140 olive trees - something that is literally impossible without major earth moving equipment and a lot of time - but that they stole them!

How many trucks would be needed to steal over a hundred olive trees? Unless they are saplings that were just planted this past year or so, this story has zero credibility.

As most of Daghlas' fantasies have.

Which doesn't stop wire service reporters from quoting him liberally.

Of course, this absurd accusation of Jews stealing trees is all over Arab media.

And if the Jews are stealing trees, then Daghlas doesn't have to show any evidence - the evidence was stolen!

There is a difference between fake news from the Palestinian Authority's official news media and from any other media. No one (besides me and a very few others) calls them on it. So when the mainstream media swallows their lies, they have more incentive to add to the lies.

It would be so easy for a Washington Post or AP to launch an investigation into the lies of the PA's official news agency. A single story would do more for peace than a hundred anti-Israel stories. But there is no interest in exposing Arab lies, and that lack of interest in covering what would be a major story in the West feeds into the fantasy that both sides have equal credibility.

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Once again, religious Jews accused of cutting down olive trees - on Shabbat

From Ma'an:

Israeli settlers on Saturday morning cut down 18 olive trees belonging to a Palestinian family in the village of Nahalin, west of Bethlehem in the southern occupied West Bank.

Journalist Hani Fanun, whose family owns the trees, said his family went to harvest olives on their land in the Wadi al-Hariq area of Nahalin, and found that settlers from the nearby illegal Gush Etzion settlement bloc had cut down over 18 large olive trees.

Whenever I see these stories, which almost invariably come out on Saturdays, I look for photos.

Most of the photos accompanying the stories show old, archive photos. but this time I actually found some photos apparently taken on Saturday of the damage:

In the photos where one can see the fallen branches, the leaves are wholly or mostly brown.

So how likely is it that these trees were cut down only hours beforehand?

We've mentioned before that cutting down olive trees is a very time consuming and difficult job. And Palestinian Arabs often prune olive trees and then claim that "settlers" are chopping them down - in order to claim compensation.

The top two pictures in particular make it appear like the trees were pruned almost down to the trunk, which is common for olive trees. Why would the "settlers" chop down the branches individually?

As usual, there is no evidence that Jews skipped synagogue on Saturday morning to cut down olive trees. This appears again to be a case where Palestinians cut or pruned the trees themselves, perhaps weeks ago, and went to the media yesterday.

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"Settlers bulldozed olive trees" - on Shabbat

From IMEMC:

A group of colonialist Israeli settlers, driving a number of bulldozers, invaded earlier Saturday Palestinian orchards belonging to residents of Deir Estia village, northwest of the central West Bank district of Salfit, and uprooted more than 80 olive trees.

Local villagers said the settlers uprooted the olive trees in order to expand a bypass road, leading to illegal Israeli settlements, built on Palestinian lands.

Bulldozers? On Shabbat?

Once again, I searched for photos or videos. All of the photos accompanying Arabic and English news stories were file photos from years past, such as this staged photo of a wailing woman next to a pruned tree:

Amazing how no one takes photos of these weekly events even though everyone carries cameras on their phones.

(h/t YMedad)

Amazing how no one ever has a cell phone when "settlers chop down trees"

From Ma'an:

Israeli settlers chopped down more than 70 olive trees between the towns of Yasuf and Jammain in the northern West Bank districts of Salfit and Nablus on Monday.

Palestinian farmers said the trees, which lay close to the illegal Israeli settlements of Ariel and Taffuh, had been cut down using chainsaws.

A local, Khalid Maali, said that because the land lay close to settler roads near the Zaatara checkpoint it had been easy for the settlers to flee afterwards.

Yet again, there is not a single photograph of these trees.

70 trees chopped down with chainsaws would take an enormous amount of effort - and leave lots of evidence. Israellycool recently showed how long it takes to chop down just one part of an olive tree with a chainsaw:

How easy is it to cut down an olive tree?
Brian here. Every year Jews are accused of chopping down thousands of olive trees maliciously: watch just how hard it is to saw off a small, dead part of a healthy olive tree. And realise how necessary this is to keeping these trees healthy.
Posted by Israellycool on Monday, June 8, 2015

But, in an unbelievable coincidence, no one who witnesses this devastation which is reported weekly ever has a cell phone with them to snap some photos!

However, the media does manage to find completely spontaneous file photos of Arab women crying next to their olive trees.

Palestinians accuse religious Jews of uprooting olive trees - on Shabbat

From Ma'an:

Israeli settlers on Saturday destroyed more than 1,000 olive trees near the village of al-Shuyukh north of Hebron, in the third such attack on the villagers' livelihood in recent memory.

Local activist Ahmad al-Halayqa told Ma'an that Israelis from the nearby settlement of Asfar, also known as Metzad, attacked the village and destroyed 1,200 trees.

He said that all of the destroyed trees had been recently planted following a similar attack by individuals from the same settlement which had destroyed trees in the area last month.

He said that the trees in the area belonged to local Palestinian farmer, Muhammad Abu Shanab al-Ayaydah as well as the children of Abd al-Qader Abu Shanab al-Ayaydah and Mousa Abu Shanab al-Ayayadah.

Al-Halayqa told Ma'an that the settlement of Asfar is located on land confiscated by Israeli authorities from Palestinian residents of al-Shuyukh, and now they hope to expand the land under their control by taking over the area where the olive trees were targeted.

Metzad is a haredi Jewish community. The idea that their members are uprooting olive trees on the Sabbath is beyond absurd.

And since "Local activist Ahmad al-Halayqa" is lying about that, he is probably lying about everything else.

As is nearly always the case, there are no photographs of these destroyed 1,200 olive trees, just as there weren't any photos of the 500 trees allegedly destroyed last month and 70 the week before that.

These numbers are now added to the absurd figure of 800,000 olive trees that the PA and an anti-Israel NGO have reported as being destroyed since 1967.

Of course, Ma'an reports the obvious lies as fact.

OCHA-OPT, which has its own problems with the truth, when in reporting on the alleged February incident, notes that the 500 "trees" were planted in a "donor-funded project," meaning that some Europeans had been paying for Arabs to plant these saplings in public lands illegally.

The annual "settlers uproot olive trees" libel

From Ma'an, today:

Dozens of Israeli settlers on Sunday uprooted over 400 Palestinian-owned olive trees near Nablus in the northern West Bank, a Palestinian Authority official said.

And last week:

Israeli settlers uprooted over 500 olive and fig trees in Deir Istiya village in Salfit on Monday morning, witnesses said.

As usual, there are no photos of these "uprooted" trees.

Based on the research that Yisrael Medad did, plus the comments on that post, it is inconceivable that a few people can uproot that many olive trees in a day - it can take hours to destroy one.

And as we have seen in years past (1993 2005 2006 2008 2010) the claims are often either ludicrous or proven to be lies.

Left wing activists caught cutting down Arab olive trees

From YNet:

Arabs and leftist activists staged an attack on Palestinian fields in a bid to accuse settlers of vandalism, an organization that claims to have documented the incident says.

Tazpit Unit [is] an organization identified with the settlers which documents news events in the territories. Tazpit says that these staged attacks were meant to falsely accuse settlers of attacking Palestinian land.

The photos, taken by members of the Tazpit Unit, were shot on Palestinian land Friday, near the Neveh Tzuf settlement. The images allegedly show Palestinians and left-wing activists cutting down Palestinian olive trees using an electric saw.

Here's the picture enlarged:

While it is possible/probable that some Jews have cut down Arab olive trees, I have still never seen a picture such as this one showing it - even though these "peace" activists are all over the West Bank looking for just such an event.

I had mentioned this phenomenon before.

Arabs prune olive trees, claim "settlers" cut them down

From Ma'an:

On Saturday morning, Salima Ewes, 73, and her family found 40 olive trees had been cut down in their field in the northern West Bank village of Al-Lubban Ash-Sharqiya, southwest of Nablus city.

Akram Jamil Uweis said his family headed to their field to harvest olives, and found their trees destroyed. He said the family believed residents of the nearby illegal settlements of Eli and Ma’ale Levona were responsible for the attack.

As is often the case, the Arabs are claiming that religious Jews cut down their trees during the Jewish Sabbath - something very unlikely.

But beyond that, look at the pictures of the supposedly chopped down trees Ma'an show us:

Olive trees have much larger trunks than what is shown here. And for olives to grow best, trees have to be pruned relatively often - sometimes down to the trunk.

By any measure, these pictures show neither that the olive trees were "cut down" nor "destroyed." And in the past we have seen Palestinian Arabs claim that their normal prunings were actually "settlers" destroying the trees - or that they pay Arab kids to cut the trees - and they get compensation from Israel when they make those claims.

And while there may indeed be incidents where hotheaded West Bank Jews do damage trees, it is hardly a one-way street. Arabs have destroyed the trees belonging to Jews, something that gets next to no coverage in the media.

And Arabs have destroyed Jewish-owned trees and crops for a long, long time.

A more subtle form of news photo bias

There are a number of countries that grow and harvest olives. Greece, Jordan, the US, Israel and Chile all market their olive products. In 2005, seven countries accounted for 90% of all olive oil production, including Spain, Italy, Morocco, Portugal, Syria, Turkey and Tunisia.

But if you search for photos of "olives" in Daylife, which aggregates wire service photos from AP, Reuters, Getty Images, Demotix and others, you see only one place where olives are being harvested.

The last 90 photos or so all show Palestinian Arabs harvesting olives, or (in the case of Getty Images) IDF soldiers taking pictures of trees that were "cut down by Jewish settlers from the nearby settlement of Yitzhar in the northern West Bank" - without even the word "allegedly."

Most of the pictures are simply straight photos of harvesting, or of families helping the harvesters.

For the exception that proves the rule, here is a photo of Tunisians picking olives that was published two months ago - but the picture was taken in 2007.

How come only Palestinian Arab olive harvesters warrant so many news photos?

The reason is clear: olives are a symbol of how they, and they alone, are connected to the land.

Jews who have harvested olives for three millennia are considered outsiders when they pick olives in their own land - somehow they are not authentic, the news services believe. Even though we can find olive presses that are thousands of years old in ancient Jewish cities. That doesn't matter - only one people have the right to pick olives in a photogenic way, and if Jews are mentioned at all, it is with the implicit of explicit accusation that they are working to destroy the true owners of all the olive trees in the Middle East.

Those evil settlers and their Zionist chemicals!

From the Hamas-oriented Palestine-Info (UK) site:

Zionist settlers destroyed tens of fruitful olive trees in Al-Mughir town, northeast of Ramallah, on Friday after spraying them with a chemical material.

Local sources said that the settlers spoiled 55 olive trees using a white chemical material unknown to locals, adding that the material dries the trees and slowly kills them.

They noted that farmers could not reach the area, which is adjacent to a Zionist settlement, fearing attacks by those settlers.

In another location, Zionist settlers attacked tents pitched by shepherds in the Jordan Valley and damaged drinking water ponds for cattle, witnesses reported.

They noted that the settlers infiltrated into the area under the cover of darkness on Friday night, adding that shepherds were not present at time of the attack.

So these religious settlers attacked on Friday night? And somehow damaged a water pond? (How does one do that, exactly?)

And, better yet, they sprayed an unknown chemical that slowly destroys olive trees - and the trees are already destroyed?

This steaming pile of garbage was, unsurprisingly, immediately picked up by Iran's ABNA news agency. And no doubt believed as absolute truth by the many who reflexively believe the most ridiculous anti-Israel stories without the slightest capacity for critical thought.

PalArabs lie about Jews cutting down olive trees

From Palestinian Arab propaganda outlet Ma'an:

Settlers from the illegal Israeli settlement of Yitzhar in the northern West Bank attacked a Palestinian family collecting olives on Saturday morning, a government official told Ma’an. Mayor Burin Ali Eid of the village of Burin, near Nablus, said a fight broke out when settlers “chopped down five olive trees” owned by the family. Local Palestinian sources said that settlers cut down 15 olive trees in other Nablus-area attacks on farmers.

Yitzhar is a religious Jewish village and the residents would not desecrate the Sabbath by chopping down any trees, so it is clear that these claims are lies. Sure enough, Arutz-7 reports something completely different:

Members of the security team in Yitzhar, in Samaria, spotted a group of Arab men entering an Arab olive grove near the Lehava neighborhood of the community Saturday morning. IDF soldiers were notified and arrived at the scene to question the men and ensure that they did not pose a danger to residents of Yitzhar. The soldiers were surprised to see that the group was busy cutting down olive trees. The men were cutting the trees in a "violent manner," soldiers said, explaining that they tried to show that there was damage to the trees instead of simply pruning them. They were apparently planning to accuse Jewish residents of Yitzhar of cutting down the Arab-owned trees, repeating accusations that have been made in recent years. The owner of the trees was not present and had not notified the army that he was planning to prune his grove, which Palestinian Authority farmers near Jewish towns are required to do.

The IDF did not quite confirm the Yitzhar residents' story:

Following Palestinian reports about clashes between settlers and Palestinian farmers near the West Bank settlement of Yitzhar, the IDF stated that the farmers arrived at the olive groves without the required permit. The statement said that after the farmers arrived in the area to pick olives, settlers began to crowd around them. IDF soldiers arrived on the scene, fired in the air and separated between the rival groups, restoring calm.

While it is hard to know exactly what happened, it is clear that the Palestinian Arab version is simply a lie, and if any olive trees were cut down on Saturday they were vandalized by Palestinian Arabs themselves.