For generations, the autumn olive harvest has defined life, culture, and survival across south Lebanon’s hillsides. Today, beneath the shadow of Israeli attacks, gathering this ancestral fruit has become a deadly act of resilience. 

In October, as the cool breeze begins to clear the oppressive heat of summer, a quiet transformation touches the craggy hillsides south of the Litani River. From the terraced slopes of Bint Jbeil and Yater, to the border villages of Kfar Shuba, Blida, and Froun, the landscape shifts. The start of autumn signals the start of the annual olive harvest, an event that forms the economic and cultural heartbeat of south Lebanon. Generations of Lebanese families gather under ancient canopies, spreading out coarse tarps over the dry ground as hands, dark with oil, gather the bitter fruit. The yield of these groves will sustain entire households, cover children’s school fees, and fill heavy glass jars with fresh oil that will last through the harsh winter months.

Across southern Lebanon, the olive tree represents far more than an agricultural staple; the olive tree stands as an enduring monument to permanence and survival. Many of the thick, twisted tree trunks anchored in the south’s limestone soil were planted centuries ago by ancestors who navigated Ottoman taxation, French occupation and administrative decrees, and Israeli invasion. To tend an olive grove along the southern frontier is to maintain an unbroken historical covenant, and a quiet assertion that regardless of who controls the skies above, the land will always belong to those who nurture it from below.

For decades, this essential season has been targeted directly by the Israeli military. Because the olive tree embodies continuity and deep roots, Israeli forces have long sought to sever the connection between southern villagers and their native terrain. During the 18 years of military occupation leading up to the south’s liberation in 2000, reaching ancestral groves near the border meant braving army checkpoints, sniper fire, and razor-wire blockades. In the subsequent years after 7 October, the deliberate Israeli targeting of the landscape has continued uninterrupted. Whenever Israeli forces launch attacks across the border, the objective remains unyielding: turn the harvest into a killing field.

The physical scale of this destruction has reached catastrophic levels. The Israeli military's widespread deployment of incendiary rounds and white phosphorus shelling across agricultural areas in the south has burned entire harvests and poisoned the surrounding soil. White phosphorus ignites upon contact with air, consuming dense foliage, burning centuries-old tree trunks into hollow columns of ash, and seeping heavy metals into the earth. Thousands of dunams of productive, ancient trees, and groves that endured through generations of historical turmoil, have been reduced to grey ash in minutes, wiping out the primary livelihood of entire villages.

Venturing into the fields to gather olives today means facing direct deadly force.