Faz3a: Protecting & Regenerating Palestinian Land in Area C

For Palestinians, land is mother & honour. This belief runs through every generation: a bond to the soil that is ancestral, spiritual, and deeply rooted — and that generations of colonization have tried, and failed, to break. The olive tree is the living symbol of that bond. A grandmother's grove is an archive of her family, tended across generations; to plant, prune, and harvest is to renew a relationship older than memory. Faz3a exists to keep that relationship alive.

This Palestinian-led campaign mobilises local communities and international volunteers to protect, cultivate & regenerate farmland and grazing land in Area C of the occupied West Bank — land being lost tree by tree and village by village to Israeli colonization. Funds raised here go directly to communities on the ground: olive saplings to replant uprooted groves, cultivation and harvesting tools, protective equipment, and the logistics that let farmers return to land that had become too dangerous to reach.

Our Mission

PSCC is working mainly in Palestinian rural localities in so called 'Area C' with farmers and shepherds, where the unprecedented acceleration of state sponsored settler violence and illegal settlement expansion are setting the conditions for forcible displacement of entire communities. The work of local activists is hindered by arbitrary brutal attacks from Israeli settlers and arrests from the Israeli occupation forces. Therefore, our mission is to empower locals and enhance farmers sumud to remain on their land and preserve it.

Faz3a (فزعة) is a Palestinian word for rushing to a neighbour's aid in a moment of danger & a deep-rooted tradition of communities coming together, en masse, against an outside threat.

Our mission is threefold:

• to build a strong international solidarity network with real capacity for action
• to mobilise a protective presence on the ground, always under local Palestinian guidance
• and to rebuild & to reinforce the capacity of Palestinian farmers and shepherds for sumud — holding onto the land — and for regaining ground lost to violence, in the most literal sense.

Faz3a is led by local popular committees, farmers, and shepherds. This is solidarity, not charity — a movement in service of land and life.

The Land and Its People

Area C covers about 62% of the West Bank and, under the Oslo framework, was placed under full Israeli military occupation. It also holds the West Bank's richest farmland, water sources, and open grazing range — terraced hillsides of ancient olive groves, almond and grape, wild herbs, and the seasonal pasture that sustains Bedouin and herding communities.

Olives are the heart of it. For Palestinians, gold is not yellow — gold is green. The olive harvest is more than a primary livelihood for hundreds of thousands of families; the oil it yields is woven into food, ritual, and identity, and each pressing renews a family's relationship with the earth. There are roughly twelve million olive trees across the Palestinian territories — a cultivated, Indigenous landscape shaped over centuries through dryland farming and agroecological Indigenous knowledge passed from parent to child.

This project will enhance traditional farming methods which will improve people economic situation. Farmers believe in the saying "Who eats from their axe’s digging, their throat will be independent”.

The Threat

That landscape is under siege & this bond is precisely what ongoing Israeli colonization sets out to sever.

In Area C, Palestinian farmers and shepherds face a coordinated effort to push them off their land, and it takes many forms.

• Access is restricted: communities are blocked from reaching their own fields, and under Israeli law, land left uncultivated because it cannot be safely reached can be declared "state land" and seized. In the 2023 season alone, more than 96,000 dunums of olive groves went unharvested.
• Settlers attack directly — farmers are beaten, harvests disrupted, homes raided.
• An ecocide: the land itself is targeted and tens of thousands of olive trees, many of them centuries or even millennia old, are uprooted, bulldozed, or burned and water sources are cut off or strategically occupied.
• Shepherds are strangled economically: herds are stolen, injured, poisoned or killed, grazing land is seized, and families who once lived from their flocks are forced to buy feed they cannot afford until they lose hope, give up, and leave. The same pressure falls on farmers who depend on the harvest as their only income.
• Forcible displacement: where harassment and hardship do not empty a village, force does: by mid-2025, the UN had documented a coercive environment of settler violence and access restrictions that displaced 69 Palestinian communities.

Each tree felled, each flock lost, each family driven out is a step in the same project — to erase an Indigenous people's sovereignty over its land.

Our Solution

Faz3a answers that threat by making cultivation possible again. International volunteers — trained in nonviolence, de-escalation, and documentation — travel to the West Bank and are stationed in threatened communities at the invitation of local committees. They work in three roles: harvesting and cultivating alongside farmers; maintaining a watchful, deterrent presence to reduce attacks; and documenting violations to bring visibility and accountability. With a protective presence in the field, families can return to groves they had not safely reached in years, harvest before restricted permit windows close, plant where trees were destroyed, and simply stay.

Why International Presence

Palestinians in the West Bank live under military law, tried in military courts with a nearly 100% conviction rate (Human Rights Watch, 2023), without the protections of due process, an independent judiciary, or ordinary policing. When settlers attack, there is often no one to call. Internationals, by contrast, are treated under civilian law — and that difference can be used as a tool. A foreign presence in a field can deter an attack that would otherwise go unanswered, and document violations that Palestinians are punished for resisting.

International presence in threatened Palestinian communities in Area C has played a significant role in protecting these communties. Through protective accompaniment, monitoring, documentation, and solidarity-based engagement, international actors contribute to reducing the immediate risks faced by civilians exposed to settler violence, military incursions, and forced displacement. Their presence often functions as a deterrent, increasing visibility and accountability while creating safer spaces for everyday activities such as farming, shepherding, education, and community life. However, international presence should not be understood as a substitute for local agency or self-protection; rather, its effectiveness lies in supporting and reinforcing indigenous strategies of sumud and community resilience. In this sense, international presence serves not only as a protective mechanism but also as a form of solidarity that contributes to sustaining Palestinian communities' capacity to remain on and defend their land.

This is why the PSCC built a campaign for international solidarity: to place that protective difference where it is needed most, under Palestinian guidance & leadership.

How We Protect and Regenerate

Our work weaves three strands together:

Conservation: we protect biodiversity, ancient olive groves, water sources, and grazing land through Indigenous-led stewardship — defending living ecosystems. Community: every village has its own approach, and we follow its lead — strengthening each community's sumud with the resources it needs and supporting education in Indigenous agroecological practices, so knowledge stays rooted where it belongs and fostering cross-community exchange of resilience practices. Disaster relief: when violence strikes, we respond — replanting uprooted groves, fencing land, reinstalling solar power, water infrastructure and cameras, rebuilding, and helping families restore livelihoods after the loss of trees or livestock.

Together these turn protection into regeneration: land reclaimed, replanted, and brought back into the cycle of life.

Sovereignty and Sumud

At its heart, this is about sovereignty — an Indigenous people's right to remain on, cultivate, and govern their ancestral land, and to feed themselves from it. Every harvest completed, every sapling planted is an act of food sovereignty and a refusal to let the land be emptied. If land is mother and honour, then to keep a family on its soil is to defend both. Sumud — steadfastness — is the Palestinian word for this quiet, rooted & collective resistance. Faz3a is its infrastructure.

What Your Support Makes Possible

This is our 7th olive-harvest season, and since 2025 Faz3a is expanding to walk with communities year-round — through planting, plowing, harvesting, and restoration, every phase of the land's life.

Your support is specific and tangible:

• Protective equipment such as fire extinguishers & flashlights
• Solar & water repairs after attacks
• Pruning, plowing, & harvesting tools
• Olive saplings to replace what was destroyed
• Housing & logistics that sustain volunteers in the field.

Modest, concrete investments that keep families rooted on their land.

Tracking Impact

We measure what we do, season by season. To date, Faz3a has mobilised more than 500 international volunteers, accompanied more than 5000 families and farmers, reached more than a 100 villages across Area C, and helped harvest 20,000 dunums of olives.

We track trees planted, dunums returned to cultivation, harvests safely completed, and incidents documented — but the deepest impact is harder to count: a grove a family can finally return to, a season completed without loss, a community that decides to stay. We gather these stories alongside the numbers, because regeneration here is measured in both.

Our Experience

Faz3a is a campaign of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee (PSCC), which was established two decades ago out of the popular committees from the active farming villages across the West Bank. PSCC has gained some victories for farmers such as in Bil'in village — where, two decades ago, Palestinian farmers used collective nonviolent action to win back confiscated land. Since 2019, we have organised olive-harvest protection alongside Palestinian communities from across the political spectrum — now entering our 7th season & expanding to support these communities year-round.

We have long experience, built strong networks with the farmers, know the land & we know how to hold it. With your support, we will keep its roots in the ground — and its people on it.