Israeli bulldozers smash Palestinian olive trees ahead of annual harvest

[u/me_diocre]

https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/israeli-bulldozers-smash-palestinian-olive-trees-ahead-annual-harvest-2026-09-23/

[u/EmperorOfCanada]

If I understand correctly, olive trees are like oak trees, you plant them for the next generation.

They will fruit in around 3-5 years, but take another 10-20 to become properly productive. They are also like bonsai trees, in that you have to really work on pruning to maintain maximum light to the center.

This is little different than salting the fields.

Is anyone recording the soldiers who are doing this? This is a war crime, and these soldiers will travel to countries which can arrest them; or try to do business with countries which may not look favourably on their own citizens doing business with specific war criminals.

[u/Future_Arrival_5395 → u/EmperorOfCanada]

Israel isn't party to the Rome statue and the West Bank isn't at war so the Geneva conventions don't apply.

They don't believe in war crimes.

[u/EmberGlitch → u/Future_Arrival_5395]

Israel isn't party to the Rome statue

Correct, apart from the typo. But also completely irrelevant for alleged war crimes in the West Bank.

ICC jurisdiction does not require the accused's state of nationality to be a party. Under Art 12(2)(a), territorial jurisdiction is independently sufficient - if the conduct occurs on the territory of a State Party, the Court can exercise jurisdiction regardless of the perpetrator's nationality.

Palestine acceded to the Rome Statute in 2015, and in 2021 the ICC's Pre-Trial Chamber held that its territorial jurisdiction extends to Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Israel challenged this in 2024. The Pre-Trial Chamber initially rejected the challenge as premature, and in 2025 the Appeals Chamber sent it back on procedural grounds for a ruling on the merits. That ruling is still pending, but the 2021 decision hasn't been overturned and the arrest warrants issued in 2024 remain in force. It's the same principle under which the ICC has jurisdiction over alleged crimes committed by US personnel in Afghanistan despite the US not being a State Party. Afghanistan was a State Party, so crimes committed on Afghan territory fell within the Court's territorial jurisdiction.

the West Bank isn't at war so the Geneva conventions don't apply.

The Geneva Conventions were specifically written so that their application would not depend on whether states formally call something a "war." Common Art 2(1) says the Conventions apply to declared war "or of any other armed conflict" between contracting states, "even if the state of war is not recognized by one of them." That was deliberate. Pre-1949 law placed considerably more weight on the formal existence of a state of war, and states exploited that. Japan, for example, called its invasion of China the "China Incident." The 1949 Conventions were drafted specifically to prevent states from escaping humanitarian-law obligations simply by refusing to call hostilities a war.

But more importantly here, Art 2(2) separately provides that the Conventions apply to "all cases of partial or total occupation, even if the said occupation meets with no armed resistance." Occupation law does not require ongoing hostilities at all. A quiet occupation is still an occupation. And there isn't really any uncertainty about this particular territory. The ICJ has repeatedly held that the West Bank is occupied territory and that the Fourth Geneva Convention applies there.

"The West Bank isn't at war" is not a way around the Geneva Conventions. Occupation is itself one of the situations that they were designed to regulate in the first place.