In Burin, Settlers Destroy Five Greenhouses in a Night After Farmers Confront a Grazing Attempt

Ghassan Najjar says the warning came the night before the greenhouses fell.

On July 13, a settler tried to graze his flock inside one of five greenhouses run by Burin's Land and Farming Cooperative, according to Najjar, the group's founder. Cooperative members held the livestock back until Israeli border police arrived. Najjar says he asked the officers why a settler had been allowed onto land the military itself had designated a closed zone, one that, on paper, bars Israeli citizens as well as Palestinians. The settler left angry. In Arabic, Najjar says, he told him: "You'll see."

The next night, by Najjar's account, roughly ten settlers arrived and destroyed all five greenhouses, cutting the plastic sheeting and tearing out the irrigation lines. The cooperative estimates the damage at about 30,000 shekels, roughly $10,000, in plastic sheeting alone. Nine thousand tomato seedlings bought that same morning, worth about 8,000 shekels, were left with nowhere to go and died within hours, Najjar said.

"This year is the most difficult year for the cooperative. We're facing many attacks by the settlers and the army," Najjar said.

The losses did not stop there, according to Najjar. Weeks later, Burin lost more than 1,500 olive and other trees, some burned by settlers, others cut down or uprooted by military bulldozers working a route accessible to Israelis but not Palestinians. Of 10,000 square meters of wheat the cooperative planted this year, Najjar says 7,000 square meters burned before farmers could bring in the harvest.

Most of the village's farmland now sits inside closed military zones that Najjar says are renewed every month or two. The orders are issued on security grounds, ostensibly to keep out the settlers doing the attacking. In practice, Najjar says, they fall overwhelmingly on the Palestinian landowners those settlers are targeting. Al Jazeera did not independently verify the damage figures, tree counts, or acreage losses, which come from Najjar and the cooperative rather than police reports or outside assessment.

The pattern is not confined to Burin. The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs recorded 1,418 settler attacks causing casualties or property damage across the West Bank through July of this year, a pace that would surpass 2025's record of 1,836. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and other rights groups have said Israeli authorities enable settler attacks and that their cumulative weight on Palestinian communities amounts to forced displacement, though no specific report is cited for this incident.

Najjar's cooperative has adapted with what members call the "Tom and Jerry Programme." "We go to the land early every morning," he said. "When the army comes, we run away. And when the army goes, we come back again." Even with nothing to plant or harvest, he said, members return simply to sit on the land and drink coffee, a way of telling settlers and soldiers the ground has not been given up.

Founded in March 2020, the cooperative began with five members and now counts about 25, seventeen of them women, farming roughly 25,000 square meters around the village. Najjar describes its mission as inseparable from politics: a fight, as he puts it, against the occupation, against Palestinian Authority bureaucracy, and to keep the land itself from being lost by attrition.