The United Nations Office of Human Rights, headed by Volker Türk, on Wednesday issued an extensive report on the Israeli military occupation of the Palestinian West Bank in which it for the first time described Israeli policies there as apartheid. The executive summary says, “The report warns that Israel is violating international law requiring States to prohibit and eradicate racial segregation and apartheid.”
Türk told the U.N., “There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank. Whether accessing water, school, rushing to hospital, visiting family or friends, or harvesting olives — every aspect of life for Palestinians in the West Bank is controlled and curtailed by Israel’s discriminatory laws, policies and practices.”
“This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation, that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before.” He is referring to racial discrimination in Apartheid South Africa from the late 1940s through the early 1990s.
“There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank.”
He concluded, “Every negative trend documented in the report has not only continued but accelerated. And every day this is allowed to continue, the consequences worsen for Palestinians.”
The report stresses how drastically the human rights situation for Palestinians in the West Bank has deteriorated since 2022:
* Palestinians in the West Bank live under a different and harsher set of laws than do the Israeli squatters who have flooded into the territory.
* Palestinians therefore have less access to resources, including land and water, than do the squatters.
* The report notes that the International Court of Justice at The Hague found in 2024 that “the systemic discrimination against Palestinians living in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, together with the restrictions of movement imposed on Palestinians through checkpoints, as well as limited access to roads, natural resources, land and basic social facilities, amounted to a situation of racial segregation.” The ICJ noted then that the situation verged on apartheid and would be properly so characterized if the Israelis did not take immediate ameliorating steps (they did not). The ICJ, indeed, ruled the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories it seized in 1967 to now be illegal, since it had departed so extensively from international humanitarian law in its rule of these people. Moreover, the international law had envisioned occupations to be short and to endure only during an active war, not to stretch into decades.