JEDDAH: Israel is struggling to prevent militant settler violence against innocent Palestinian civilians in the occupied West Bank, the country’s defense minister conceded on Wednesday.

Yoav Gallant’s admission to the Knesset followed a series of attacks by settlers, including one rampage last week in which a young Palestinian man was killed. Rioters have numbered in the hundreds and included masked and armed men, at least two of them off-duty soldiers.

Gallant condemned the rampages as “a dangerous social phenomenon that we must fight.” He said the militants were a “tiny group” of fringe settlers and their supporters from inside Israel.

Israeli forces found it challenging to divide their attention between settlers and Palestinian militants, he said. “There are 500 Palestinian villages, some of them as large as towns. There are tens of thousands of people. You can’t protect all of them at once.”

Gallant said arresting Israelis was hard “because you’re not using surveillance or violent operations against them,” an admission that Palestinians were treated differently.

In a rare move, four settlers suspected of attacking Palestinians have been subject to administrative detention, a controversial measure usually applied only to Palestinians.

Nevertheless, Israel remains under mounting pressure from the US over settler violence because many of the victims are Palestinian Americans who hold US passports.

“Accountability and justice should be pursued with equal vigor in all cases of extremist violence,” the US Office for Palestinian Affairs said.

At the UN, Middle East Envoy Tor Wennesland said he was “alarmed by the extreme levels of settler violence, including large numbers of settlers, many armed, systematically attacking Palestinian villages, terrorizing communities, sometimes in the proximity of Israeli security forces.”