AQRABA, West Bank - The first rain needed to wash the summer dust off the green leaves had not yet fallen. The fruit was still green, not the ripe color of bluish-black. When squeezed, the precious oil did not easily ooze out.
It was too early to pick the olives.
But Khariah Zayaier was in a hurry. He must harvest his olives before the shooting season begins.
Perched in a scraggly olive tree that he thinks dates to Roman times, Zayaier grabbed a branch and stripped off the olives in a downward motion. The fruit fell and scattered on a white tarp spread on the ground.
His children, sitting in the shade below, popped a few hard olives into their mouths and frowned at the bitter taste while their mother gathered up the harvest. They worked quietly and efficiently on the ancient stony terraces that climb this northern West Bank hillside.
Just days before, one of their neighbors was fatally shot in a confrontation with Israelis from a nearby Jewish settlement who are trying to stop the Palestinian farmers from entering the fields, which belong to the Palestinians.
The olive branch, the symbol of peace in this biblical land, has become yet another reason to fight.
"We are scared," said Zayaier, 52, one of the few people willing to venture into the olive groves, which have been in his family for too many generations to count. "We pick with one eye on the tree and another on the hillside. We are going as fast as we can."
That means starting the 45-day harvest early to outsmart the settlers, who not only shoot over their heads to scare the farmers away but have begun entering the Palestinian groves and picking the olives for themselves.
Olives are a staple of the Palestinian diet and the only source of income for many farmers who have carved out an existence on this hard, rocky land. Here, olives are as good as money, wealth is measured in jugs of oil and a man's status is rooted in the number of trees he owns.
But the 2-year-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict has turned what should be a joyous and bountiful harvest into a dangerous enterprise.
Battles with the settlers have long been a problem during the olive harvest but have intensified this year because of growing frustrations and bitterness over the violence, which has people on both sides living in fear and seeking ways to exact revenge.
"The Palestinians must understand that there is a price for war," said Daniel Shukron, secretary of the Jewish settlement of Tapuah in the northern West Bank. He admits to firing over the heads of Palestinian olive pickers, in part to protect his settlement but also to get back for roadside ambushes and suicide bombers.
"If the Palestinians don't want this price, they should start behaving," Shukron said, noting that the olive trees from the tiny neighboring Palestinian village of Yassuf come within yards of his security fence. He said many homes in Tapuah have been shot at in recent weeks.
"It would be mad to let the Palestinians come close to the settlements," he said. "Some of the people don't come for agriculture and tending their land but to gather intelligence on what is happening here."
The army has cleared away many of the trees close to Tapuah, creating a 400-yard- wide no man's land between the grove and the settlement. Shukron said anyone who enters that zone is a security threat and risks getting shot. "They violate the order, and we can't allow it," he said.
Palestinian olive pickers have other problems as well.
Israeli army bulldozers routinely clear crops along roads used by settlers to eliminate hiding places for ambushes, and entire groves have been declared off-limits for security reasons. In addition, a fence being built around the West Bank could put hundreds of acres of trees on the Israeli side of the barrier.
Even if farmers can successfully harvest their crops, Israeli army checkpoints, closures and curfews will make it difficult, if not impossible, to get the olive oil to market. Many Palestinians have gallons of unsold oil left over from last year.
Zayaier is risking his life to pick a crop he might never be able to sell. Asked what he would do with his estimated yield of 300 gallons of olive oil, he paused from his work and simply shook his head: "I have no idea."
Aqraba is a large village southeast of Nablus that climbs up the side of one hill and down the other, with a marketplace on the ridge. About 8,000 people live here, and the ones who don't farm run the four olive presses.
The importance of the olive is spelled out clearly on a wall at the village entrance, where visitors are greeted by a large painting of an olive tree with a man in a traditional Arab headdress sitting underneath. Instead of a statue in the town square, there is a stump of a long fallen olive tree.
The olive trees are a source of pride and sustenance, a definition of character and a way of life. Some have been dated to the time of Christ, and their ability to survive centuries of conflict is a reflection of hope in a region where death is all too routine.
"Losing a tree," said Mispah Taher, 40, an Aqraba farmer, "is like losing one of your sons. You spend your life raising a tree, and someone can come and destroy it in a minute."
Added the village elder, Mohammed Sharif: "Without olives, there is no life."
So when the olives become ripe in October, everyone goes to the groves and the harvest begins in earnest. Families swarm the trees, with up to a dozen people attacking each one until all the olives are bundled into tarps. Then they move on to the next tree.
Babies swing in makeshift cradles hanging from the branches, lulled to sleep by the gentle breeze. Men climb ladders to reach the treetops while their wives sit below to collect the fruit or work the lower branches.
But the Jewish settlers from Itamar don't want the Aqraba harvest to take place, at least near the road, which winds through the rugged hills linking the main north-south route, heavily patrolled by the army, to the isolated hilltop community.
Though the people of Aqraba can't see Itamar, they can see the growing number of caravans that have popped up on the hillside directly opposite, a demonstration of the settlement's expansion into the far reaches of their olive groves.
On Oct. 6, armed settlers from Itamar approached the pickers of Aqraba and demanded that they leave. The pickers were on top of a hill, about a mile from the road and even farther from the settlement.
The crowd on both sides grew, and fights broke out. Each side blamed the other for starting it. Atef Tawfiq, 40, said one settler hit him above the left eye with the butt of a gun, causing a gash that required seven stitches.
"We tried to tell them that we just want to pick our crops," Tawfiq said, his head wrapped in a dirty white bandage. "We told them to just leave us alone."
Shortly after the skirmish broke up, shooting started. The Palestinians said it came from the settler road at the bottom of a valley. One bullet apparently shot blindly into the group of olive pickers hit Hani Bani Minyeh, 24, in the thigh as tried to climb a stone wall to escape. He died a few hours later.
The villagers complained that Israeli police refused to investigate and that the army stood by and did nothing, unwilling to protect Palestinians from fellow Israelis. But police said they have recovered the bullet from Minyeh's body and were trying to determine whether it could be linked to a gun carried by one of the settlers.
A few miles away in Yassuf, Mohammed Abdel Fatah, 38, tried to harvest his olive groves near the entrance to Tapuah, the Jewish settlement. Israeli soldiers approached before he could pick one olive.
"Go, leave, before the settlers come and kill you," one soldier told Fatah, who moved to another spot, only to be confronted by a settler carrying a gun. "Leave it now," the settler said. "This is ours."
Fatah retreated, carrying his empty white sack and pail across a dirt mound piled by the Israeli army to keep cars out of the village, and went home.
He said he would try again later this month when an international aid group has promised to come and protect the pickers.
He must pick his olives.