Amnesty International has found Israel’s systemic oppression of Palestinians fits the international legal definition of apartheid and has called for it to be held accountable.
On Tuesday it released a 278-page report detailing the ways Israeli authorities carry out “the crime of apartheid against Palestinians” by enforcing the system of domination and treating them as “an inferior racial group”.
The report, titled Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime against Humanity, investigates mass seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions and the denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians.
Speaking at a press conference in occupied East Jerusalem, Amnesty’s secretary-general Agnes Callamard said the report revealed the true extent of Israel’s apartheid regime.
“Whether they live in Gaza, East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank, or Israel itself, Palestinians are treated as an inferior racial group and systematically deprived of their rights,” she said.
“It is the cruelty of the system — the intricate evolving administration of control, dispossession, and inequality, the incredible detailed bureaucratisation upon which that system is predicated.
“Its sheer banality and at times absurdity that has taken my breath away.”
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In the report Amnesty has provided a number of recommendations for a way forward to dismantle the apartheid system, which includes removing the discrimination and segregation that upholds it and provides equal rights to all Palestinians in Israel.
“It must recognise the right of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to return to homes where they or their families once lived, and provide victims of human rights violations and crimes against humanity with full reparations,” a statement read.
Israeli officials were quick to call for the report to be withdrawn.
Israel’s foreign minister Yair Lapid rejected the report, which includes hundreds of pages of research and legal analysis, as “divorced from reality”.
2. The crime of apartheid is well-defined in international law. It is the systematic, prolonged, and cruel discriminatory treatment of one racial group by another with the intention of maintaining that system of domination and control.
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The report was welcomed by the Palestinian Authority, which said it hoped it would lead to prosecution of Israel at the International Criminal Court.
“The state of Palestine welcomes the report by Amnesty International on Israel’s apartheid regime and racist policies and practices against the Palestinian people,” the authority’s foreign affairs ministry said.
Amnesty joins Human Rights Watch, B’Tselem and a number of other Palestinian human rights groups and activists who have been accusing Israel of the crime of apartheid in the 74 years since the Zionist state was established in 1948.
