Eight Olives.. A Scandal on a Prisoner’s Plate

Writer: Issa Qaraqe

Israeli Channel 14 revealed, on October 1, 2026, the seizure that overtook the extremist Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir, the leader of the war of extermination and gallows in the occupation prisons, when he received a picture of a meal for one of the Palestinian prisoners in the Negev prison, which showed eight olives instead of six. A state of emergency was declared, and this minister cut short his holiday during the Jewish holidays to travel, provocatively, to the Negev prison, for three hours in the heart of the desert, to deter the security and existential threat facing the State of Israel, and to extract two olives from the stomach of that prisoner, holding the guards accountable for exceeding the system of starving prisoners and destroying their physical and psychological being.

Control begins with olives, Ben Gvir shouted at the guards: This is the season of war on the olive tree and its blessed oil. Uproot the trees, steal the crops, kill the farmers. This tree is history, narrative, and memory that denies our existence on this land. Its roots are Palestinian, extending thousands of years. Destroy it. The olive tree is the mother of the Palestinians, the mother of the elderly and the land deeds, a living being that carries the archive of Palestine.

The seventh and eighth olives in the shallow meal of the prisoner allow him to live a little, and the oil flows into the dry bones, altering the amount of life that reaches the body. This contradicts the military instructions that see starvation as a tool for control, domination, and slow death. Starvation is the most horrific tool of torture in the occupation prisons, and the most despicable and degrading. Hunger is a policy, and the morsel is a tool of punishment, and the stomach is a battlefield.

Ben Gvir fears two extra olives on the prisoner's plate because he knows that olives in Palestine transcend food; they are the tree of freedom, the memory of the farmer, the season of harvest, songs, and the scent of homes, the tree of patience and adaptation to harsh conditions and long life, the tree of heaven that lights its oil even if it is not touched by fire, a tree with green arms that embrace the souls of martyrs, a tree that does not shed its leaves in front of any storm.

A complete state, with all its apparatus, army, laws, and prisons, mobilizes for a few olives in a prisoner’s food, moving from cell to cell to see the effects of starvation as a weapon of extermination, the erosion of humanity, the collapse of the body, the fading of features, and the dissolution in that terrifying silence behind the wall. A state that still fights to eradicate the taste of olives from the mouth of the prisoner, and from the hills and fields of Palestine; because it knows that the olive in the land of Palestine is older than the age of the occupying state, and that it is a living document, a witness, a cultural and symbolic entity of steadfastness, resistance, and defiance against the policy of erasure and annihilation.

Eight olives shake a state. After more than three years of bloody extermination war, the prisoner still has appetite and dignity, snatching life behind bars and rising from the rubble. The olives have become a matter of national security, as it is essential to control the quantities of calories that enter the stomach of the restrained human, the number of beans, slices of bread, minutes of showering, and hours of sleep, to impose sovereignty over the meaning of freedom that cannot be measured by numbers, counted, or limited by boundaries.

Dignity is not measured by quantities of food nor weighed in grams. There is an unconquerable will in those thin bodies, and there is an olive tree that remains in the bodies as awareness, identity, and culture, and oil that flows from one grain of soil to the last generation that carves its existence in the memory of oblivion, and in the modest slopes' rocks.

A minister stands at the prison gate, with a small plate containing eight olives in the prisoner’s meal, a scandal and a breach of taboos, and a security proof that olives enter the most designed places to reduce the human being. The minister arrived, not because there was an escape attempt, nor due to a major event, but because of two extra olives in the prisoner’s meal, this is the sensational breaking news, yet it does not reveal the hell behind it: the fate of thousands of prisoners who are ground in a terrifying machine, through hunger, torture, illness, isolation, revenge, and cold death in the dark.

How do human rights organizations document scenes of an Israeli minister rampaging publicly and brutally in the occupation prisons? What legal language can describe a prisoner dying of hunger? These are not just violations, nor is hunger merely a humanitarian condition or mistreatment; it is a law, an ideology, and a comprehensive colonial policy, starting from burning olive trees, to the last scream of a Palestinian prisoner banging on the iron doors and shouting: I am free, and we will remain as long as thyme and olives endure.