Israeli police have arrested 10 suspects in the occupied West Bank following settler attacks in which a US journalist and European diplomats were among those injured.

Masked settlers beat Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine on Friday as she covered an olive harvest in the Palestinian village of Abu Falah. The following day, settlers attacked diplomats from Belgium, France and Poland, as well as representatives of the Catholic Church, in the Palestinian Christian village of Taybeh.

Why is the harvest so significant for Palestinians?
Between 80,000 and 100,000 Palestinian families depend on the olive harvest for at least part of their income, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Every autumn, thousands of families handpick olives, in an industry that has sustained communities for generations. To many olive-growing communities, the harvest represents not just livelihoods but cultural identity, family heritage and attachment to the land.

Palestine’s Ministry of Agriculture estimates that olive oil production in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip will reach approximately 21,000 tonnes this year. Around a quarter of that would be surplus to domestic need and could be exported. But that yield projection is based on farmers being able to access and harvest their groves.

Settler attacks during the current olive harvest season have already surpassed the total for 2025. The UN has documented 199 such attacks in the West Bank so far this year, with one death, 124 injuries and damage to more than 2,500 trees and saplings.

What are the attackers’ motives?
These attacks in the West Bank “are not new”, said Al Jazeera. Every year, “Israeli settlers and hardline groups use the olive harvest period to assert control over valuable agricultural lands”, including by “stealing crops, or building illegal settlement outposts and roads on private Palestinian property”.

This annual ritual of “assaulting farmers, burning or uprooting trees and stealing crops” is “making it increasingly dangerous for Palestinians to reach and remain on their own land”, Ahmed Najar, a Palestinian political analyst and playwright, told the outlet. The attacks are also designed to “deter international campaigners from accompanying Palestinian farmers, standing with them against settler violence and documenting the atrocities being committed”, he said. “The objective is not only to dispossess Palestinians, but to ensure that their dispossession happens without witnesses.”

Go into a British bookshop and you may notice “a glaring stock gap”, said Lydia Spencer-Elliott in The Independent. “Star novelist” Sally Rooney, whose bestsellers include “Normal People” and “Conversations With Friends”, has announced that her books will no longer be sold in the UK due to her support for Palestine Action.

The Irish novelist had pledged to donate royalties from her books to the direct-action protest group, despite the UK government proscribing it as a terrorist organisation. Rooney said last week that her publisher, Faber & Faber, had decided it could no longer sell her work in the UK because doing so could “constitute a serious criminal offence”. For fans and bookshop owners, the news “hit like a gut punch”, said Spencer-Elliott.

‘Self-imposed withdrawing’
Rooney has shown courage in choosing “the thorniest path possible for this cause”, said Zoe Williams in The Guardian. Authors “write essays and sign letters” in support of Palestinian people, and musicians shout about it on stage, but that doesn’t “entail actively breaking the terrorism laws”. 

Yet despite “the uproar”, this isn’t “massively risky” for either Rooney or Faber, said Camilla Long in The Times. How many of her “whopping” six million worldwide book sales will she forgo? Her books “remain in libraries” and in any UK bookshops where they were already in stock before her announcement. This isn’t a “book ban”; it’s a millionaire’s “self-imposed withdrawing of one’s further sales”.

‘Rock and a hard place’
This is “attention-seeking self-aggrandisement”, said Lionel Shriver in The Telegraph. Thanks to lucrative TV adaptations of her novels, Rooney can “easily live without further British royalties” and continue to “shout her devotion to Palestinians from the rooftops” (or fund their cause via multiple legal outfits). Faber, on the other hand, was caught “between a rock and a hard place”.

I’m “no fan” of Palestine Action, said Sam Leith in The Spectator. Some of its members have “committed a campaign of criminal damage”. But Rooney and Faber have pushed the “simultaneous intolerance and vagueness of the UK government’s position” on the group onto “the front tables at Waterstones”. The problem isn’t Rooney’s speech, free or otherwise; it’s Britain’s “inconsistent attempt to police the border between legitimate protest and criminal thuggery”. What a “fine mess” we’re in.

A red stag peers over a bush in London’s Richmond Park. Visitors are being warned that the annual deer mating season has begun, making stags more unpredictable and potentially aggressive.

Brook Mitchell / Getty Images

A “growing cohort” of time-poor travellers are treating their holidays as an “investment” in themselves, said Bloomberg. The desire to “come home with more than Instagram shots as souvenirs” has given rise to “purposeful travel”: the skillcation.

Nearly half of Europeans plan to learn a new skill on their summer holiday, according to recent research by Mastercard. Tourists are looking for experiences that “create muscle memories”, said the company’s senior economist Natalia Lechmanova. From “winemaking and woodworking” to pottery and painting, consumers are “opening their wallets” for a taste of local culture and a “lesson that lasts long after they’ve arrived home”. 

These trips tend to cost more than conventional holidays, but the pay-off is high. People often see “longer-lasting positive effects on psychological well-being” than from holidays focused on “sun, sea and partying”, psychology professor Andrew Stevenson told Bloomberg. Spending time learning a new skill provides an added “feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment”.

Over the years, “I’ve clumsily thrown myself into swing dancing lessons in Italy, free-diving sessions in French Polynesia, and Spanish intensives in Ecuador”, said Julia Eskins in Vogue. “I came home from each one feeling a little more capable than when I arrived.”

The goal is to fill time with “experiences that teach, reconnect and transform”, said Forbes. Travellers going on skillcations usually opt to learn something unavailable to them at home, such as tactile crafts like “Peruvian weaving or Japanese pottery-making”. And they’re more interested in learning about “heritage, expertise, traditions and customs” than ever before.

Putin can smell Washington’s desperation
Owen Matthews in The Spectator
Donald Trump’s “latest broadside” at Volodymyr Zelenskyy will go down “as a major turning point” in the Ukraine war, writes former Moscow correspondent Owen Matthews. With everything “going the Kremlin’s way”, Vladimir Putin will “play for time”, scoring “political points with Trump and buying a few more weeks and months” to “hammer Ukraine’s cities”. Putin’s arrogant enough to still “mess things up”, but it’s “clear” that “America has chosen Russia as the side on whose terms the war will end”.

Don’t be fooled. The AI that was supposed to save us time is doing just the opposite
Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian
The government hopes AI can “transform the machinery of the state on the cheap”, writes Gaby Hinsliff. But so far, it’s not “streamlining public service delivery” so much “as gumming it up”. Whitehall is “drowning in AI-generated freedom of information requests”, and in courts, “people who can’t afford lawyers” are “using ChatGPT to build cases that often don’t make sense”. “Faster and easier” isn’t always better, and “time saved” here “has a horrible habit of popping up” there. “Let the Whac-A-Mole begin.”

There’s no way of sugaring it — puddings are for prats
Giles Coren in The Times
Apparently, “young people are going crazy for” sticky toffee pudding, fruit crumble and trifle, writes Giles Coren. How “stupid”: don’t they realise “grown-ups stopped eating that crap years ago”? Puddings contain nothing but “refined, imported, environmentally cataclysmic, slavery-compromised, gut-killing, heart-stopping, tooth-rotting, brain-deluding, provably poisonous sugar”. Only morons, “brought up by lazy parents who used sugar as a bribe”, see them as a “treat” to “be ordered in restaurants with a blush and a giggle”.