TURMUSAYYA, WEST BANK -- Olives sit rotting in the back of a charred Mercedes-Benz pickup truck, one of seven burned-out vehicles lining the dusty road. Beyond them, against a backdrop of blackened fields, a dozen men and women reach apprehensively from their ladders for the prized crop.

There in the distance, Israeli soldiers stationed by a new Jewish settlement watch over the scene, a simple olive harvest that has turned into the latest battleground in the Middle East.

In the northern reaches of the West Bank, in the area that Jewish settlers call Samaria, the olive harvest has been carried out every autumn since time immemorial, but rarely with the violence that has engulfed this year's season.

Human-rights groups have accused extreme right-wing settlers of waging a campaign of intimidation against Palestinian olive farmers, who have been attacked almost daily in the past month. One Palestinian farmer has been killed.

The Israeli human-rights group B'Tselem has also reported widespread theft of harvested olives, mostly under the watchful eye of Israeli security forces on the nearby hilltops.

After the latest attacks, 40 Israeli writers, artists and businessmen picked olives with Palestinian villagers south of Nablus yesterday as a show of solidarity. "I came to protest against what I regard as a crying and vicious plunder of the Arab olive harvest," the writer Amos Oz, who joined the olive pickers, said.

The controversy over Jewish settlements, and their threat to olive farmers, was one of the key reasons behind the collapse yesterday of Israel's coalition government. The centre-left Labour Party said it would no longer be party to budgetary support for the settlers.

But in Turmussaya, politics have not calmed any fears among villagers who claim they are attacked regularly by residents of the nearby settlement of Shevut Rahel.

The attackers come at night, said Najeh Ahmed Araj, a farmer with about five hectares of olive groves, the economic mainstay for this small village of 6,000 people sitting midway between Nablus and Ramallah.

"They wore masks and had M-16 rifles and they sprayed some kind of powder on the cars to set them alight," he said of a recent attack. "We tried to fight back with stones and with our hands."

The Israeli army recently stepped in, after a rash of attacks led to protests from Israeli human-rights groups. The army warned settlers to stay away from the olive pickers.

"We've been attacked five times so far this year. Now our village is full of anger and despair," said Mohammed Ali Ahmed, Turmusayya's former mayor.

"We've tried to take the settlers to court but we weren't listened to, and the attacks have increased because they feel strong, they are being supported by [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon. This is the first time we've had any protection from the soldiers."

Similar accounts can be heard in Yanun, a small, ancient village half an hour north of Turmusayya, where Mr. Oz's group worked yesterday,

Tucked into hills directly below the ultramilitant Jewish settlement of Itamar, Yanun has seen fires set, buildings smashed and livestock stolen in recent months. The village's entire population of 150 people fled last week to the nearby town of Aqraba, after armed men from Itamar reportedly descended on the village and its olive groves.

Most of the villagers returned after the Israeli army and social activists moved into the area.