These olive trees are older than the State of Israel. “You endure, and we endure. You are rooted, and we are rooted with you,” Abdul Latif Al-Bazzari tells them, back on his land in Burqa, northwest of Nablus, before his wounds have even healed. Less than a week earlier, on October 7, Israeli colonial terrorists backed by the Israeli occupation army attacked families from Burqa harvesting olives on their land between Burqa and the Ramin plain, opening fire and beating them with clubs and iron bars.
Abdul Latif was among those wounded in the attack. It killed Ali Hassan Yusr Al-Bazzari, 44, who according to witnesses was shot and left bleeding for around two hours while the attackers kept ambulances from reaching him, and wounded 16 others. Asked how he could return to the same trees, Abdul Latif compares himself to a drowning man who has no choice but to fight his way out of the sea. Standing beside a trunk thick with centuries, he challenges the colonists who claim the land: who planted these trees, who watered them, who pruned them and guarded them for hundreds of years? The tree, he says, is his witness.
Mike