For Palestinian Australian winemaker Sari Kassis, planning for tomorrow is a difficult endeavour.
Farmers like Kassis are skilled at forecasting — they read the weather and soil conditions and predict whether their harvest will be profitable.
But in the occupied West Bank, where his family's vineyard stands, the rhythm of tending grapevines is regularly disturbed by more dangerous conditions.
"In terms of sales, we've been suffering since October 2023. In recent months, about a quarter of the vineyard has been damaged and destroyed," Kassis tells SBS News.
"In the most recent attack, the settlers entered an area we didn't expect them to reach — farther than they usually go. The direct damage affected about one-third of the vines."
Sari Kassis says his family vineyard is under threat from Israeli settlers. Source: SBS News / Lilian Cao
The United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has documented 1,680 attacks by Israeli settlers across more than 270 communities in the West Bank so far this year — an average of five per day. An OCHA report released this month noted that the harvest season has been marked by widespread settler violence targeting farmers, crops and property.
Kassis says he and his family now face losing the vineyard they have lovingly tended for years, growing grapes since the 1990s and olives for much longer.
The vineyards have been in our family for decades.
"Initially, the grapes we had planted were here from the days of my grandmother and before — she was the farmer between her and my grandfather, who was usually away from home serving in the British Mandate police force," he says.
A vineyard under threat
Kassis moved to Sydney when he was 17. He then moved overseas for a couple of years to pursue university studies and returned three years later when his parents and brother migrated to Australia.
He returned to the West Bank in 2022 to help his uncles and cousins run the family vineyard, which is situated near Birzeit, north of Ramallah.
"We have several varieties — Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Dabouki which is an indigenous white grape variety that is usually a food grape," Kassis says.
"Our Dabouki [a type of white white] won an award — a silver medal — at the Decanter World Wine Awards in 2021, marking the first Palestinian wine to win such an international award."
When Kassis arrived, what he found was a place where daily life had become fragile.
The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has documented 1,680 attacks by Israeli settlers across more than 270 communities in the West Bank so far this year. Source: SBS News
Israel's retaliatory offensive has killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, according to health officials in Gaza.
Kassis' family, like many others nearby, has been the target of repeated violent attacks allegedly carried out by Israeli settlers.
A few months ago, he says things started escalating again.
He recalls receiving a letter in August 2025 from Israeli authorities declaring a new "military security zone", which would span roughly 7,000 square metres of agricultural land, including a portion of his family's property.
"At the centre of this zone is a new settlement outpost that follows the ideology of Meir Kahane," Kassis says, referring to the late extremist rabbi from the United States, who moved to Israel to become a politician.
Kahane's ideology, proffered in the 1980s, was widely considered to be ultra-violent and fringe, blending ethnonationalism and religious fundamentalism. Termed 'Kahanism', it's now regained traction among some on the far-right and emboldened groups of Israeli settlers targeting non-Israelis on what they believe is Israeli land.
"What makes it worse is that it now has the backing of Israel's finance minister [Bezalel Smotrich]," Kassis says.
For the family, planning ahead — a vital element of farming — has become nearly impossible.
"Part of the zone overlaps with our farms. To go in, we need a permit from the army. Some days they let us through; other days they block the way with no explanation," Kassis says.
"We built a water pool on our land — invested everything — and the army waited until it was finished before destroying it."
Kassis says the vineyard has been subject to repeated attacks since the start of the harvest season. Source: SBS News / Lilian Cao
There are now more than 700,000 mostly Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which are part of the Occupied Palestinian Territories — recognised as the State of Palestine by Australia in September.
One hundred and fifty-six other nations also recognise Palestine as a state.
Israel considers the West Bank a disputed territory, not an occupied territory.
The rise of the Hilltop Youth
The newly declared zone impacting Kassis' property surrounds a small illegal settler outpost set up by a group known as the Hilltop Youth.
"The outpost consists of about seven or eight young Israeli settlers — I think the oldest is in his early twenties," Kassis says.
"Their main goal is to change the balance between Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank by forcing Palestinians to flee their farms and lands by any means."
Sanctioned by Australia, the United Kingdom and the European Union, the group unapologetically adopts the teachings of Meir Kahane, including a strict separation of Jewish and non-Jewish people in Israel. In the mid-1980s, Kahane put forward a set of bills, which proposed that any non-Jew in Israel be forced into "slavery or forcibly deported".
According to the Jerusalem Post, when his party was elected in 1984, all members of the Knesset boycotted him, leaving anytime he spoke.
Despite his assassination in New York in 1990, his influence has grown in recent decades.
The Jewish Power party (Otzma Yehudit), now a six-member part of Israel's governing coalition, has been described by Israeli media as a "legal rendition" of Kahane's party, though its leader, Itamar Ben-Gvir, claims to have broken with its more extreme elements.
According to Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem, settler violence is not just the work of fringe radicals, like Hilltop Youth.
Sarit Michaeli, B'Tselem's international director, says attackers operate with political and logistical backing.
"It's important people understand this isn't just a few teenagers setting fires," she tells SBS News.
"These groups act as an informal arm of the state — and they enjoy almost total impunity."
Between 2005 and 2024, Yesh Din, an organisation in Israel that works to protect Palestinian human rights, found that more than 93 per cent of police investigations into settler attacks ended without any indictment.
'All we can do is film'
For the Kassis family, the threat is constant and close.
They keep their phones charged and ready to record; the only protection they feel they have.
"All we can do is film," Kassis says.
They're armed. If we get close, we give them an excuse to attack. When we call the army, they show up hours later.
"Maybe they say a word to the settlers, maybe not. But by then, the damage is done."
SBS News has seen videos of Israeli settlers trespassing on Kassis' property, bringing sheep into the vineyard to graze and throwing rocks, and footage of vines having been cut.
The UN has warned repeatedly that Palestinian farms and villages are facing one of the most violent periods on record.
In October 2025 alone, OCHA documented more than 260 settler attacks — the highest number since monitoring started in 2006. More than half of these were olive harvest-related attacks.
But despite the challenging reality, Kassis is still holding on.
"In the end, this is our land. We take care of it so that it takes care of us — and we are a stubborn people."
The UN reports that since October 2023, more than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli forces and settlers. During the same period, it says, Palestinians killed 19 Israeli civilians.
Ramiz Alakbarov, UN deputy special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, said: "These attacks destroy harvests, injure farmers, and tear apart livelihoods."
"The olive harvest is an economic and cultural lifeline."
Source: SBS News
A rare response
There have been a handful of instances in which violent settler attacks have been called out by the Israeli government.
When settlers recently attacked Israeli security forces dismantling the illegal outpost of Tzur Misgavi in the Gush Etzion area, near the Palestinian town of Sair in November, Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu publicly condemned the violence, saying: "I call on the law enforcement authorities to deal with the rioters to the fullest extent of the law."
But Michaeli argues such statements rarely reflect what happens on the ground.
"When officials say it's limited or that they're addressing it, they're not telling the truth," she says.
The state funds and enables these groups to reshape the land — violently and permanently.
A spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) rejected this claim, saying the IDF's mission is "to maintain the security of all residents" in the West Bank.
"Due to the IDF's constant presence in the area, the soldiers encounter incidents of violations of the law by Israelis, some may be violent incidents or incidents directed at Palestinians or their property," the spokesperson said.
"In these cases, the soldiers are required to act to stop the violation and, if necessary, to delay or detain the suspects until the police arrive at the scene."
In addition to attacks, there are mounting fears over the potential annexation of the West Bank, as pushed by the far-right members of Israel's Knesset.
In November, it passed a draft bill that would allow Israelis to buy land in the occupied West Bank — a move critics say accelerates de facto annexation.
Under Israeli law, every bill must pass three readings before becoming law.
'We'll endure'
On a hot day in late November, Kassis stands in his vineyard, surrounded by grapevines that have survived seasons of uncertainty.
Sari Kassis says leaving the West Bank is not an option: he intends to stay and defend his land. Source: SBS News / Lilian Cao
"This is the land we grew up on," he says.
"My principles don't allow me to abandon my country and my land, to stop resisting, to stop standing against a colonial system whose sole purpose is to erase me and erase my existence.
Whatever comes, we'll endure it.
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