TEHRAN - West Bankers are facing a kind of vicious tribal-like war initiated by violent Israeli settlers and soldiers.

Tribal war is like the law of the jungle in which no rules of war are observed. In this tribal war, Palestinians in the West Bank are defenseless and unprotected. They are living in a constant state of fear.

While the world’s focus is mostly on Israel’s unthinkable atrocious war in the Gaza Strip, cruel settlers are going on the rampage in the West Bank.

West Bankers are being driven out of their homes and farmlands; their farms are being demolished; their sheep are being stolen and communities of sheepherders are being forced to flee; their homes and cars are being set on fire; their agricultural lands and crops are being destroyed by untreated wastewater released from settlements, etc. 

Injustice against the Palestinians in the occupied West Bank is not something new. However, it has intensified since the start of the Gaza war in October last year. During this time, 528 Palestinians, including 133 children, have been killed by Israeli security forces or settlers.

Israel is not just committing war crimes in the Gaza Strip; it is also doing so in the West Bank.

“In the West Bank, the (UN Independent International) Commission (of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian territory) found that Israeli forces committed acts of sexual violence, torture and inhuman or cruel treatment and outrages upon personal dignity, all of which are war crimes,” Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said in a report on June 12.

The United States and the European Union that have announced sanctions against violent settlers in the West Bank have so far refused to target major tribal war leaders, including Itamar Ben-Gvir and settlement financier Bezalel Smotrich.

So far, only Benzi Gopstein, an epitome of the tribal war criminal who is a top ally of Ben Gvir, is facing symbolic sanctions by the Biden administration and the European Union.

If in 1994 the extremist Hutus in Rwanda killed more than 800,000 civilian Tutsis and moderate Hutus, the Israeli soldiers and extremist settlers in the occupied West Bank have been treating Palestinians as sub-humans. They have been humiliated, intimidated, displaced, arrested, abused, and killed for decades.

What settlers are doing against Palestinians in the West Bank is in many ways similar to what is being done against civilians in Sudan’s West Darfur by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Rohingya population in Myanmar at the hands of the military and others.