UN Report Values Israel for Practicing Apartheid in West Bank

UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk. (Twitter/@volker_turk OHCHR)

JAKARTA - The United Nations on Wednesday said discrimination and segregation against Palestinians by Israel in the West Bank over decades was intensifying, calling on the country to end its "system of apartheid."

In a recent report, the UN Human Rights Office said "systematic discrimination" against Palestinians across the occupied Palestinian territories had "drastically worsened" in recent years.

"There is a systematic clampdown on the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank," UN Human Rights Chief Volker Turk said in a statement, launching Al Arabiya from AFP (8/1).

"Whether it's accessing water, schools, rushing to the hospital, visiting family or friends, or harvesting olives - every aspect of the lives of Palestinian citizens in the West Bank is controlled and restricted by Israel's discriminatory laws, policies, and practices," he said.

"This is a very severe form of discrimination and racial segregation, which resembles the apartheid system we have seen before," Turk said.

Wednesday's report said Israeli authorities "treat Israeli settlers and Palestinians living in the West Bank under two different legal and policy frameworks, resulting in unequal treatment on a range of important issues."

"Palestinians continue to be the target of large-scale land seizures and deprivation of access to resources," he added.

This has led to "the expropriation of their land and homes, along with other forms of systemic discrimination, including criminal prosecutions in military courts where their rights to due process and fair trial are systematically violated."

Although a number of experts had previously judged the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories as apartheid, this is the first time that the UN Human Rights Chief has used the term.

Turk on Wednesday demanded that Israel "abrogate all laws, policies, and practices that perpetuate systemic discrimination against Palestinians on the basis of race, religion, or ethnic origin."

The discrimination is exacerbated by continued and escalating settler violence, in many cases "with the consent, support, and participation of Israeli security forces," the rights office said.

It is known that more than 500,000 Israelis currently live in settlements in the West Bank, which has been occupied since 1967 and is home to about three million Palestinians.

Violence has escalated in recent years, especially since Hamas' October 7, 2023 attack, which triggered the Gaza war.

Since the start of the war, Israeli forces and settlers have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, including many militants as well as dozens of civilians, according to AFP's calculations based on figures from the Palestinian health ministry.

According to official Israeli figures, at least 44 Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed in Palestinian attacks or Israeli military operations in the same period.

Since the Gaza war began, Israeli authorities have also "more extensively used unlawful violence, arbitrary detention, and torture," the report said.

The increase in "repression against civil society and undue restrictions on media freedom (and) severe restrictions on movement" has also characterized an "unprecedented deterioration of the human rights situation" in the West Bank, he said.

There has also been rapid settlement expansion, which is considered illegal under international law, even as illegal killings of Palestinians take place "with near-perfect impunity," the report warned.

"Of more than 1,500 killings of Palestinians that took place between the beginning of 2017 to September 30 last year, Israeli authorities opened only 112 investigations, which resulted in only one conviction," he said.

Meanwhile, thousands of Palestinians remain arbitrarily detained by Israeli authorities, mostly under so-called "administrative detention", without charge or trial, he said.

The report states that it has found "reasonable grounds to believe that this separation, segregation, and subordination are intended to be permanent in order to maintain the oppression and domination of Palestinians."

This, according to the report, is a violation of international anti-racism conventions, "which prohibit racial segregation and apartheid."

The U.N. Human Rights Office on Wednesday urged Israel to end "its illegal presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including by dismantling all settlements and evacuating all settlers, and to respect the Palestinian people's right to self-determination."