The UN human rights office has issued a report detailing what it calls Israel's systemic discrimination against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and said the situation has drastically deteriorated over the past three years.
Israeli laws, policies and practices were having an asphyxiating impact on every aspect of daily life for Palestinians and violated an international convention against racial discrimination, it said.
This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before, High Commissioner Volker Türk warned.
Israel dismissed the accusations as absurd and distorted.
The Israeli mission in Geneva said the UN human rights office completely ignores fundamental facts that lie at the basis of the [Israeli-Palestinian] conflict, and that inform the actions and policies of the State of Israel, mainly the grave security threats Israel faces, which were put on display on October 7, 2023.
It accused the office of issuing yet another unmandated report and having a politically driven fixation... on vilifying Israel.
Israel has built about 160 settlements housing 700,000 Jews since it occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem during the 1967 Middle East war. An estimated 3.3 million Palestinians live alongside them.
The settlements are illegal under international law.
This marks the first time a UN human rights chief has explicitly compared Israeli policies to apartheid. Türk stated that access to water, education, healthcare, and even visiting family is hindered by Israel's discriminatory laws.
According to the 42-page report, Israeli authorities treat settlers and Palestinians under distinct bodies of law, leading to significant inequality. The report finds large-scale land confiscation and deprivation of resources continues to dispossess Palestinians.
The report emphasizes that systemic discrimination has been a persistent issue, but worsened drastically since December 2022, particularly after the events following the Hamas-led attacks on Israel in October 2023.
