The couple, parents to four young children, are badly bruised and shaken up, but both will be okay. Badawe says it was the second time in four days that he was attacked. On October 12, settlers handcuffed and blindfolded him and his two brothers and drove them, in their tractor, to the local Huwara military base. There, he says, they were beaten by the settlers and soldiers and fined more than £200 for not having a proper licence for the tractor. Badawe said the settlers, who also didn't have a tractor licence, were not fined.

Last week a 24-year-old man from the neighbouring village of Akhraba was shot dead in his fields. Last year, Israeli settlers killed two Palestinians during the olive harvest. Nobody has been arrested for the murders. Activists from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a loose-knit organisation which brings Western civilians to the Occupied Territories in the hope that, by their presence, they will provide an element of protection to Palestinians in the fields, go up the road towards where the settlers have been spotted.

I accompany them. On the way we pass around 15 to 20 members of the Abu Mahmoud family, their donkeys laden with olives, returning to the village.

"There are at least three of them," says Hani Abu Mahmoud. "We saw them coming down the hill, but then we lost them. I don't want to take the risk of staying. They have guns, we don't. We have no way of defending ourselves against them. Maybe we'll come back to the fields tomorrow if you internationals will join us."

His 10-year-old son Mohammed points to where the settlers were last seen.