Sayyid Mustafa Hosseini, expert in Zionist regime studies
In a world where breaking news and devastating images from Gaza flood media platforms on a daily basis, the West Bank, this green and sacred land of Palestine, gasps for air like a hidden wound beneath a stifling media silence. The fragile ceasefire in Gaza, established in November 2025, not only failed to signal an end to the bloody confrontations in southern Palestine, but also provided a golden opportunity for the Zionist regime to intensify its occupation policies in northern Palestine, namely the West Bank.
This analysis, grounded in current data from international bodies such as the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and verified field reports from Palestinian and international sources, examines the prevailing realities in the West Bank and underscores its core imperatives. It moves beyond merely chronicling the grim statistics of settler violence to provoke a deeper contemplation of the Palestinian cause itself. The West Bank now demands global attention with unprecedented urgency; for without it, the vision of a unified Palestine – the aspiration of generations – will be lost forever.
This narrative addresses an audience spanning European policymakers, American human rights advocates, and scholars of West Asia, illustrating how the occupation of the West Bank is not a fleeting event, but a structured system that tramples the human rights of millions of Palestinians. Documented evidence reveals that media silence is not accidental negligence, but a deliberate instrument for advancing colonial designs. The establishment of an independent Palestinian state is not an emotional aspiration but a self-evident human right.
The occupier’s golden opportunity with Washington’s green light
In the wake of the Gaza ceasefire, the Zionist regime, with redoubled audacity and a clear green light from the US, has aggressively intensified its occupation of the West Bank. This occupation advances not only through the construction of concrete walls and suffocating checkpoints but also through deadly strategic schemes such as the E1 plan. This scheme seeks to forge a colonial bridge linking East Al-Quds to the illegal Ma’ale Adumim settlement bloc, effectively splitting the West Bank into two disconnected northern and southern parts and permanently burying any possibility of establishing a contiguous and sovereign Palestinian state.
In August 2025, Netanyahu’s government issued final authorization for the construction of over 3,400 new housing units in the strategically sensitive E1 area—a move that had been stalled even under prior Israeli administrations due to significant international pressure. This time, however, the Trump administration not only voiced no objection, but the new US Ambassador to Tel Aviv, Mike Huckabee—a politician and Christian Zionist who has publicly characterized settlement expansion as the “divine right of the Jewish people”—openly defended the plan, calling it “a necessary step for Israel’s security.”
Huckabee’s explicit support, coupled with the telling silence of the US State Department, conveyed an unequivocal message to Netanyahu: you have complete freedom to fully implement the E1 project and sever the vital artery of the West Bank.
This unconditional backing is precisely the firm support to which Imam Khamenei, the Leader of the Islamic Revolution referred to on November 27, 2025, when he stated: “The Zionist regime’s attacks on Lebanon, its aggressions against Syria, and its crimes in the West Bank and Gaza — where the entire world is witnessing the situation in Gaza — are all carried out with the US’s backing. And due to these actions, the United States has truly suffered a loss and become despised.”
This statement captures the present reality of the West Bank with striking accuracy: Every bulldozer leveling land in the E1 area for a new settlement is fueled by American dollars and with the approval of the US ambassador. Every permit that is issued is backed by the assurance of a likely US veto at the Security Council. This boundless American backing has not only emboldened the Zionist regime to persist in its crimes, but has also numbed the global conscience to a catastrophe that is unfolding in silence.
An open-air prison enclosed by nine meter-walls
Beyond the rapid expansion of settlements, the occupying regime has transformed the West Bank into an open-air prison through a dense network of nine-meter concrete walls and more than 700 permanent and flying checkpoints. The wall – which the International Court of Justice declared “contrary to international law” in its advisory opinion of July 9, 2004, and which the UN General Assembly demanded be immediately dismantled in Resolution ES-10/15 – has not only been expanded by the Zionist regime but has also been accompanied by a discriminatory system of yellow and green permits. This system reduces the freedom of movement for millions of Palestinians to a momentary and humiliating authorization granted by occupying soldiers. According to a 2025 United Nations report, Palestinians are forced to spend hours daily in degrading checkpoint queues; ambulances are stopped, pregnant women give birth at checkpoints, and patients lose their lives. This is a system that, in the words of the UN Special Rapporteur, was designed not for security, but to entrench spatial apartheid,[1] fragmenting the West Bank into more than 165 isolated and besieged enclaves. These walls and checkpoints are far more than defensive tools. They are iron chains binding the hands and feet of the Palestinian people, digging deeper each day into the flesh and bones of the land and permanently erasing the geographical map of a contiguous Palestinian state.
Media silence: Complicity in crime
Media silence in the face of this occupation is not accidental but an integral part of the Zionist regime’s strategy. While images of devastation in Gaza dominate global screens every night, news from the West Bank – including the demolition of hundreds of residential buildings in 2025 according to OCHA reports – is pushed to the margins. This manipulation compels a fundamental question: how can one envision a world that turns a blind eye to one of the gravest violations of international law, namely the sixty-year occupation of the West Bank? The legal argument is straightforward. The Fourth Geneva Convention of August 12, 1949 explicitly prohibits the construction of illegal settlements, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 of December 23, 2016 unequivocally condemns them. Yet in 2025, the Zionist regime, in open disregard of these rulings, approved thousands of new settlement units in Area C of the West Bank. These statistics represent more than cold data; they symbolize the profound suffering of millions of Palestinians being systematically severed from their ancestral lands. The bitter truth remains that without urgent global intervention, the West Bank – the beating heart of Palestine – will cease to beat.
Settler brutality under state protection
If the state-led occupation of the West Bank is the root of a poisonous tree, settler brutality is its thorn-covered branches. In 2025, settler attacks against Palestinians in the West Bank reached an unprecedented record. According to reports by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, October 2025 was the most violent month for settler aggression since 2006, with more than 260 recorded attacks – reflecting an average of over four incidents per day – ranging from the torching of olive trees to armed assaults on defenseless farmers. Throughout 2025, OCHA documented more than 178 Palestinian deaths, many of them linked to settler violence and military forces. These attacks are not random incidents. They are part of a systematic pattern that has affected more than 80 Palestinian towns and villages.
Imagine Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest season – a symbol of a millennia old identity – confronting settlers who set trees ablaze and devastate farmlands. In November 2025, settlers set fire to a mosque in the West Bank, prompting the United Nations to warn that this sharp escalation in violence constituted part of an ethnic cleansing process. Media outlets such as The Washington Post and Al Jazeera have documented scenes of destroyed farmland and mapped the wide scale of settler attacks since October 7, 2023, revealing the expanding geographical reach of this violence. These figures, drawn from credible international and Palestinian reports, compel the reader to accept a stark reality. Settler violence is not self defense. It is an organized campaign of land seizure. Palestinians are the victims of this brutality, and the world is obligated not merely to hear of their suffering, but to witness and accept this truth with eyes wide open.
Mandatory Death Penalty: Apartheid laid bare
On November 11, 2025, the Knesset of the Zionist regime approved the first reading of the controversial “Mandatory Death Penalty” bill by 39 votes – a proposal that in practice applies exclusively to Palestinians accused of attacks against Zionists. The bill, backed by Itamar Ben-Gvir, the far-right Minister of National Security, mandates the death penalty for Palestinians, while providing no mechanism whatsoever to punish settlers who kill Palestinians. Amnesty International responded immediately, stating that “Israel must immediately halt this discriminatory bill” and describing it as “a step toward legalized apartheid.”
This legislative approval represents more than a judicial measure. It is a stark symbol of systematic inequality. While Palestinians face execution without fair trials, violent settlers continue to operate with full state impunity.
The punishment Is designed to target “only Palestinians,” leading critics to denounce it as overtly racist. The legal argument is unequivocal: the bill violates Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), which enshrines the inviolable right to life. In 2025, this proposal forms part of a broader wave of discriminatory laws designed to institutionalize apartheid across the West Bank. Envision a Palestinian child sentenced to death on unsubstantiated charges of “terrorism.” The world must not only hear this injustice but act decisively against it.
Imprisonment without crime: Even breathing is forbidde
Walls and checkpoints are not the only physical cages. Through mass and unlimited arrests, the Zionist regime has also chained the lives and futures of millions of Palestinians. According to reports by the Palestinian Commission of Detainees and Ex Detainees Affairs and the prisoners’ rights organization Addameer, by November 2025 more than 10,500 Palestinians were being held in Israeli prisons on so called “security” charges, with over 3,500 subjected to administrative detention[2] - meaning imprisonment without charge or trial. In August 2025, hundreds of Palestinians were arrested, and since October 2023, more than 17,000 arrests have been recorded across the West Bank. Reports by Palestinian human rights organizations indicate that by November 2025, approximately 3,368 individuals were held in administrative detention, many of them children imprisoned without any formal accusation.
These groundless arrests – underscored by Defense for Children International-Palestine’s finding that “half of detained Palestinian children are held without charge” – compel any conscientious observer to reflect. Administrative detention, which can continue for months without evidence, constitutes a blatant violation of human rights. In July 2025, hundreds of arrests were recorded, and this pattern has continued throughout 2025. Such pressure strips away normal life and pushes Palestinians to the margins. Without an end to these arbitrary detentions, lasting peace remains impossible.
The West Bank is home to more than 2.8 million Palestinians and contains 60 percent of Palestine’s water and natural resources. Without it, the Palestinian cause remains incomplete. Reports by OCHA emphasize that the violence of 2025 has affected more than 80 areas, further underscoring the gravity of the situation. Global attention, therefore, is not a charitable gesture but a moral imperative. United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) explicitly demands withdrawal from territories occupied in the conflict. The world must finally see the West Bank clearly, for to save it is to save the very possibility of Palestine.
If the West Bank dies, Palestine will be buried
This is not the end of the story. The wound of the West Bank deepens by the day, and every moment of global silence signifies yet another form of surrender to occupation. Today, while Gaza breathes under a ceasefire, the West Bank bleeds beneath the blade of settlement expansion and settler violence. If the world continues to stand idly by, tomorrow there will remain neither a Gaza nor a West Bank; only an occupied Palestine whose very name will be forgotten. This is not a warning, but a bitter reality affirmed by United Nations statistics, field reports, and the cries of millions of Palestinians. The time for action has arrived. Silence is complicity with the occupier. A unified Palestine is the inalienable right of the Palestinian people, and no colonial project can strip them of this right. The world must awaken, before it is too late.
)The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Khamenei.ir.)
[1] “Spatial apartheid” refers to the racial–ethnic segregation achieved through control and fragmentation of geographical space, imposing severe restrictions on the movement of one ethnic group (here, Palestinians) for the benefit of another group (settlers of the Zionist regime).
In simple terms: “spatial apartheid” means that the Zionist regime, through walls, checkpoints, dedicated roads, settlement expansion, and closed military zones, deliberately divides the West Bank into hundreds of isolated pieces so that:
a. Palestinians cannot move freely, develop their economy, or form a contiguous state.
b. Settlers of the Zionist regime can live on the same land with full rights and superior facilities.
[2] The Zionist regime has allowed itself, under the term “administrative detention,” to detain Palestinian citizens without any legitimate reason, citing merely “preventive” grounds, for an indefinite period. This practice deprives the detainee and their lawyer of knowledge of the reasons for detention and often leads to repeated extensions of the detention order. For years, this has seriously disrupted the lives of thousands of the indigenous Palestinian population.
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