ISRAEL is carrying out ‘the crime of apartheid against Palestinians’ and must be held accountable for treating them as ‘an inferior racial group’, Amnesty International said in a new report released yesterday.
The 280-page report details how Israel enforces a system of oppression and domination against the Palestinians.
Its damning investigation lists a range of Israeli abuses, including extensive seizures of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer, drastic movement restrictions, administrative detention and denial of nationality and citizenship to Palestinians.
It describes these as components of a system that amounts to apartheid under international law.
‘This system is maintained by violations which Amnesty International found to constitute apartheid as a crime against humanity,’ the group said in a statement.
Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued a policy of establishing and maintaining a ‘Jewish demographic majority’, the report said.
Husam Zomlot, Palestine Ambassador to the UK, said: The most significant part of the report is the recommendation that the UK government must take immediate action, given its historical responsibilities.
‘The UK’s historical responsibility on Palestine, the Balfour Declaration that has promised our land and the action is very well-defined.
‘The UK must ban illegal settlement products, stop arms trade that ends up in violation of human rights, revisit the issue of UK companies that work with these illegal settlements, recognise the state of Palestine.
‘Regrettably, because of the current toxic political atmosphere which is tending towards populism I don’t think the UK now is in the situation that we would want it to be.
‘But the real good news is that public opinion in this country is very much in support of the position of Amnesty International.
‘We saw only last May there were hundreds of thousands of the people of Britain in the streets who will in the end force the British politicians to actually take the right course of action as they did in ending South African apartheid.
‘The UK politicians were not on the right side of history then, they might not be now, but this wave of international solidarity is going to force them onto the right side of history sooner or later.’