European foreign ministers have finally done what much of the West has spent years avoiding: they have admitted, however cautiously, that settler violence is not an unfortunate excess at the edge of Israeli policy, but one of its working instruments.
The EU’s new sanctions target three Israeli settlers and four settler organisations accused of terrorising Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. The decision had been blocked for months by Hungary’s previous government. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, said it was time to move from “deadlock to delivery” and that extremism and violence must carry consequences. Israel’s foreign minister responded with the familiar outrage, accusing Brussels of drawing a false equivalence between Israeli citizens and Hamas. That complaint would carry more weight if the West Bank were not living under a system in which armed settlers, land seizures and political patronage have blurred into one grand machinery of dispossession.
The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs says 2025 saw the highest number of settler attacks on record, while 240 Palestinians were killed by Israeli forces and settlers last year, against 17 Israelis killed by Palestinian militants. Since January 2023, thousands of Palestinians have been displaced by settler attacks and access restrictions. The International Court of Justice has already declared Israel’s occupation unlawful and warned states against aiding or assisting its continuation. The EU has therefore not invented a new moral standard. It has merely taken a small step towards enforcing an
Israeli forces have killed more than 800 Palestinians since the October 2025 truce, with strikes reported almost daily. Water supplies remain strangled. Medicines are scarce. UN Women says more than 38,000 women and girls were killed between October 2023 and December 2025, an average of 47 every day. If this is what a ceasefire means, then the word itself has been emptied of meaning.
Lebanon shows where impunity travels next. Israel’s latest campaign has killed more than 2,800 people, injured nearly 8,700 and displaced more than 1.2 million. Villages have been cordoned off, infrastructure battered, and a so-called buffer zone carved out inside Lebanese territory.
Clearly, more statements will not be enough. Islamabad should push the OIC towards legal and economic measures against settlement-linked trade, increase humanitarian assistance for Gaza and Lebanon, and build a diplomatic case around the ICJ opinion rather than mere sentiment. *