A farmer from Burqa is killed as settlers and soldiers open fire on the olive harvest

Ali Hassan al-Bazzari, 44, from the village of Burqa northwest of Nablus, was killed on Wednesday while Palestinians were harvesting olives on farmland near the village. The Palestinian health ministry gave his name. Al Jazeera rendered it Ali Hassan Yasser al-Bazzari. Reuters, citing the same ministry, used Ali Hassan Yusor al-Bazzari. Sixteen other people were wounded. The Israeli military said both its soldiers and settlers opened fire. It was not clear on Wednesday which of those shots killed him.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society said its teams treated five people in the area. Two had gunshot wounds. Three had been beaten. Wafa, the Palestinian news agency, reported that several of the wounded, including a woman, were taken to hospitals in Tulkarem and Nablus. The Red Crescent also said Israeli forces assaulted ambulance crews trying to reach the injured and briefly detained three paramedics and a volunteer.

A harvest that now starts under fire

The olive harvest in the occupied West Bank runs from October into November. For many villages it is the main cash crop of the year, pressed into oil and sold through the winter. Palestinian officials and farmers have described this season as one in which pickers are being shot at, journalists attacked, and trees damaged. The Palestinian Authority says Israeli settlers have killed at least 30 Palestinians in the West Bank this year. Al Jazeera's Nida Ibrahim, reporting from Ramallah, said attacks this year have destroyed at least 45,000 trees across the territory.

Burqa sits in the northern West Bank, in the belt of villages west of Nablus that has seen repeated settler raids during previous harvests. Wednesday's incident was not a clash at a checkpoint. The health ministry and Reuters both placed it on farmland where people were picking. That is the fact that will travel. A man died on a harvest day, in a village that takes its name into the oil it sells.

Who fired, and who was stopped from treating the wounded

The military's statement that soldiers and settlers both opened fire narrows the argument without ending it. In earlier harvest shootings, Israeli authorities have sometimes said troops fired at people throwing stones, and Palestinian medical services have said the dead and wounded were pickers. Here the army has already put settlers on the list of those who fired. It has not said who fired the round that killed al-Bazzari, and the health ministry has not published a wound description that would settle the question.

The ambulance detail is separate and easier to check against the Red Crescent's own account. Three paramedics and a volunteer were briefly detained, and crews were assaulted while trying to reach the injured. That is a second incident inside the first: a medical team stopped on the way to a harvest field where two people had already been shot.

A funeral, and a season that is not over

At the funeral, al-Bazzari's son Danial, 12, wept over his father's body. The body was later draped in a Palestinian flag, Reuters reported. The harvest will continue for weeks. Villages that still have fruit on the trees have to decide whether to pick under the same conditions that killed a 44-year-old man on Wednesday, or to leave the crop.

The numbers already on the record are specific enough to use. One dead, named. Sixteen wounded. Five treated on the spot by the Red Crescent, two of them shot, three beaten. Three paramedics and a volunteer held for a time. Thirty Palestinians killed by settlers this year, on the Palestinian Authority's count. Forty-five thousand trees destroyed, on Ibrahim's figure from Ramallah. None of those figures tells a family in Burqa whether the next picking day will be quieter. They do tell anyone reading the military statement that both soldiers and settlers fired, and that the fatal shot has not been assigned.