BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip — Moussa Saadat and his wife, Fatima, pick olives and thoroughly inspect them to see if they are damaged or not. They explained to Al-Monitor that worms had infested the majority of this year’s crop.

The damaged olives, which cannot be pickled because of holes created by the worms, are thrown in a bucket to be pressed. If undamaged, the olives are placed in another bucket and used for pickling. The third bucket that contains black and undamaged olives has the smallest number.

This process of sorting olives takes days, due to the poor vision of the couple who is in their early 60s. Moussa's glasses do not help him much, and his wife refuses to wear hers, she told Al-Monitor.   

The couple owns a small, green plot of land that has 13 large olive trees as well as other citrus and fig trees in Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip. “This year, our crop has been very bad and less than we expected. The majority of it was damaged by worms. It is not just our trees; the same thing has happened to the majority of growers,” Moussa said.