UN: 55 Years of Israeli Occupation over Palestinian Territories is Apartheid

Geneva, MINA – Michael Lynk, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories calls on the international community to accept and adopt the findings in his report that apartheid is being practiced by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territories.

“The Palestinian territories have been occupied by Israel since 1967 and Israel has a very discriminatory dual legal and political system, granting privileges to 700,000 Israeli Jewish settlers living in 300 illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank,” Lynk said in his report as quoted from Wafa on Saturday.

“Living in the same geographic space, but separated by walls, checkpoints, roads, and an entrenched military presence, more than three million Palestinians, without rights, live under oppressive rules of institutional discrimination and without a path to Palestine,” he added.

In addition, the two million Palestinians in Gaza are described as open prisons without adequate access to electricity, water or health, the economy and without the ability to travel freely throughout Palestine or the outside world.

The Special Rapporteur said a political regime that deliberately and clearly prioritizes the fundamental political, legal and social rights of one group over another within the same geographic unit based on racial-national-ethnic identity thus meeting the international legal definition of apartheid.

“Apartheid, unfortunately, is not a phenomenon confined to history books in southern Africa. Rome’s 1998 International Criminal Court status became law after the collapse of the old South Africa. It is a forward-looking legal instrument that prohibits apartheid as a crime against humanity today and in the future, wherever it may exist.”

Lynk said that the Israeli military administration in the occupied Palestinian territories has been deliberately built with the aim of defending the facts on the ground, especially through settlements and barricades.

The Special Rapporteur said the international community bears a lot of responsibility for the current state of affairs.

“For more than 40 years, the UN Security Council and General Assembly have declared in hundreds of resolutions that Israel’s annexation of occupied territories is unlawful, the construction of hundreds of Jewish settlements is illegal, and Papp’s rejection of Palestinian self-determination violates international law,” he said.

To end the practice of apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territories, the Special Rapporteur calls on the international community to devise imaginative and robust accountability measures. (T/RE1)

Mi’raj News Agency (MINA)