A woman harvests olives in the southern Lebanese village of Kfeir on Nov. 15, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and Hezbollah. (Credit: AFP)
Hajje Kamela Choukeir’s 10 olive trees bear just enough fruit every year to give her and her four grown children all the olive oil they need. Like many Southerners, this is enough. Buying olive oil in a store is unthinkable; the land, even a small parcel of it, can provide everything a family needs.
But this year, Kamela’s not on her land. Her olive grove is in Mais al-Jabal, a southern Lebanese village less than two kilometers from the Blue Line that has been bombed by Israel — at war with Hezbollah since October 2023 — more than 500 times, according to Mayor Abdelmenhem Choucair. Kamela fled with the Sept. 23 escalation and now, satellite imagery shows whole neighborhoods flattened. But this didn’t stop her from going home to pick her olives this season.
Her family was not happy. “I got into a huge fight with my four grown children and two teenage grandchildren,” she says with a laugh. But then the serious tone returns to her voice. “Israelis don’t scare me, but losing this season’s harvest does.”
There was no way, with her trees still standing, that she would buy olive oil. “We are Southerners, we don’t do that,” she says. So the grandmother in her 70s called a driver she knows and trusts, and, on a mid-October morning, he drove her to her trees.
As she picked, Kamela felt decades younger, refreshed and full of energy. “I can’t breathe [in the city], but I breathe perfectly well in the South,” she says. “The air of the South is different.”
Her children kept calling her, trying to convince her she’d made the wrong choice. “They wanted me to come back, but I said ‘No way. I’ll only come back with the produce.’”
A few days later, Kamela made it back. But maybe it was luck. On Nov. 14, Yassin Bou Ghaith also went to harvest olives in a field outside the town of Habariya. The next day, L’Orient Today’s correspondent reported an Israeli drone had fired a missile on Ghaith as he was picking and he was killed.
‘Refrain from returning to your olive groves’
The regions most bombarded by Israel — Nabatieh, South Lebanon, and Bekaa governorates — together account for 49 percent of Lebanon’s olive oil production, says Mercy Corps economist Roland Riachi. Around 77 percent of producers are smallholders, managing orchards of less than 5,000 square meters.
Seasonal workers, members of a family that has been working with Karim Arsanios for the past 3 years, harvest olives earlier this season. Traditional olive picking, done by hand, is healthier for the trees, Arsanios explains. (Credit: Michele Aoun/@solarolives on Instagram)
If the bombs themselves hadn’t forced people to flee, the threat of them still looms. The Israeli army has issued wave after wave of evacuation warnings for the South, telling residents to move north of the Awali River, some 60 kilometers from the border, an area that includes all of South Lebanon and Nabatieh.
“Refrain from traveling south and returning to your homes or olive groves,” the Israeli army’s Arabic-language spokesperson said. “These are dangerous combat zones,”
Israel has a history of attacking its adversaries through the destruction of their olive trees. In October, the United Nations humanitarian office, OCHA, said Israeli settlers had attacked Palestinian olive groves in a ‘war-like’ manner, burning, vandalizing or stealing around 600 mainly olive trees in the West Bank since the start of this year’s harvest.
In November 2023, only a month into fighting, Israeli fire had already burned 47,000 olive trees in southern Lebanon, according to the Ministry of Agriculture. By February 2024, the U.N. was reporting that Israeli strikes had forced around 270 farming families to abandon their land completely. By June, 1.13 million square meters of olive groves were burned, the National Early Warning System Platform’s figures revealed.
‘It’s like a tree is a member of their family’
“Olives are an irreplaceable ingredient in Lebanon,” says economist Hala Gharib. “It’s a family affair, passed down from generation to generation. Rarely do people buy from elsewhere. Most families have a reserve stock, and if that runs out, they have friends, extended family, who they can buy from.”
Lebanon is thought to be the source of all olives in the Mediterranean basin. Their cultivation goes back 6,000 years and the Phoenicians are credited with bringing them to neighboring countries.
An over 1,100-year-old olive tree in Lebanon’s north is part of a grove known as “Noah’s Trees.” People believe it was from their branches that the Bible’s hope-bearing dove plucked a sprig. In the South, Kawkaba’s olive trees date from around the same period. Olive oil, a staple in so many ways, is often referred to as “liquid gold” and the tree has long been seen as a sacred symbol of peace, resilience and liberation.
“The connection people have with trees, it’s like a tree is a member of their family,” says Karim Arsanios. He’s the fourth generation to inherit his family’s grove near Batroun. Tending to and harvesting from an olive tree is a form of resistance, he says, not just against war, but against a system that demands people be reliant on what the market can supply them with.
The reserve of olive oil, which would last on average for about a year, Gharib estimates, “guarantees a certain autonomy” through food security and self-sustainability, that is, if families were given enough time to pack it up as they fled their homes.
Now that autonomy is being threatened, and from multiple angles at once. Israeli bombs from the sky and white phosphorous shells, even fireballs catapulted across the border wall. What isn’t burned is sometimes covered in smoke and dust, and it’s all happening within an economy that for five years now has been in a continuous state of collapse.
Children pick olives during harvest season in Rmeish in southern Lebanon on Oct. 23, while smoke from a nearby bomb fills the sky. (Credit: Vincenzo Circosta/AFP)
Facilities are damaged, hired workers are asking for higher pay and insurance for transportation vehicles is up. Trade routes are being bombed. In early October, Masnaa Crossing, the main point at which to enter Syria through the Bekaa was targeted, leaving a large crater in the road and forcing shipments to be rerouted on longer and more costly trips.
In the South and in the Bekaa, harvesting olives could cost someone their life.
Hajje Saniyah Hussein was forced to leave her land and her olive trees in Baissarieh, in Saida district, and is now staying in a shelter. She didn’t want to share its name, worried, as many are, that Israel would bomb it. In her 60s, unmarried and without children, Hussein’s olives are her main income. The few hundred dollars they bring her every season lasts her all year, she says. “The school I’m sheltering at provides breakfast and dinner, but I still need money for other expenses.” So she went and picked her olives.
In 2023, Lebanon exported $36.5 million in olive oil, Riachi says, but most of the olive oil stays close to home. In a good year, Lebanon will export around 25 percent of the total yield, down to around 10 percent in a less fruitful year.
The most recent census from the Ministry of Agriculture, dating back to 2010, shows that an estimated 15 percent of all land planted with olive trees was used for home consumption. “This provides affordable, high-quality olive products for domestic use,” Riachi says, “highlighting the crop's importance in Lebanese food security and self-sufficiency.”
Environmental concerns
What has been harvested and processed is also threatened. It is still unknown whether the toxins unleashed by Israeli ammunitions will contaminate the olives or even the soil itself, white phosphorus being of specific concern.
Abbas Baalbaki, a researcher at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and member of the Green Southerners environmental NGO, says there are two main hazards that both the olives and the olive pickers could be susceptible to. “The dust from the bombardment, which may contain toxic materials and smoke from the burning of explosive residues and homes.”
“For now, all farmers can do is wash their crops thoroughly with warm water and use protective measures, wearing masks, gloves, and protective gear when harvesting,” Baalbaki says.
Samer Hasbany, an olive farmer from Deir Mimas, tried reaching out to UNIFIL, specifically the Spanish brigade stationed nearby, to assess potential phosphorus contamination on his land.
According to Dr. Milad El Riachy, head of the Department of Olives and Olive Oil at the Ministry of Agriculture, preliminary tests of one soil sample from Deir Mimas showed no signs of increased levels of heavy metals, but Riachy warned additional studies on a wider selection of soil and oil samples must be conducted.
Hasbany wasn’t given a chance to find out either way. On Oct. 4, Deir Mimas was issued an evacuation warning by the Israeli army, which had designated it as a military zone, and the olive trees that have survived remain unpicked.
Last year’s olive season was a weak one and many producers anticipated a significant yield to follow this year, says Ibrahim Tarshishi, head of the Bekaa Farmers Association. With bombs still falling on groves across the east and the south of the country, the season is hard to gauge.
Agricultural fields burned by Israel in southern Lebanon, near Marjayoun, Oct. 30, 2024. (Credit: AFP)
Usually, Hasbany, who won a Silver Medal at the Dubai Olive Oil Competition in 2023, starts harvesting in September, before the olives ripen.
“Deir Mimas was first hit on Oct. 21, just days before we expected to finish our harvest,” he said. His father had been in the field every day along with the team of workers. “For the sake of safety, they ceased their work,” Hasbany explains. He’s not sure he’ll get any olive oil this year.
A few NGOs have stepped in to help farmers from the South, but with limited resources at their disposal, Hasbany says. As for the state, he has not heard of any infrastructure in place to support the vital and hard-hit sector, and neither has Riachy.
“I remember my father selling our olive oil in October and November to cover our school and university fees,” Hasbany recalls. “Without the harvest, the financial strain is unbearable.”
In Nabatieh district’s village of Ansar, Hassan Chaitani films a video of his 80-year-old grandmother who returned to tend to her olive groves. In the video, she holds a bottle of fresh olive oil, its deep yellowish-green hue a testament to her resilience.
“The southern olive groves — Israel can’t stop me or other Southerners from tending to our land,” she says, her voice cracking. “May God protect our south from our enemies, and may we return to our land.”
Reporting contributed by Renee Davis.