UN rights chief says Israeli policy in West Bank ‘resembles apartheid system’

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 also accused the office of abusing its position “to issue yet another unmandated report” and having an “inherently 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 – land Palestinians want, along with Gaza, for a hoped-for future state – during the 1967 Middle East war. An estimated 3.3 million Palestinians live alongside them.

The settlements are illegal under international law.

This is the first time a UN human rights chief has explicitly compared Israeli policies in the West Bank to apartheid – the policy of racial segregation and discrimination that was enforced by the white minority government in South Africa against the country’s black majority from 1948 until 1991.

“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” Türk said in a statement.

According to the 42-page report by his office, Israeli authorities treat Israeli settlers and Palestinians living in the West Bank under two distinct bodies of law and policies, which it says results in unequal treatment on a range of critical issues.

“Palestinians continue to be subjected to large-scale confiscation of land and deprivation of access to resources. This has had the effect of dispossessing them of their lands and homes, alongside other forms of systemic discrimination, including criminal prosecution in military courts during which their due process and fair trial rights are systematically violated,” it finds.

The report says there are “reasonable grounds to believe that this separation, segregation, and subordination is intended to be permanent, indicating that these laws, policies, and practices amount to a deliberate policy of physical and juridical separation intended to maintain oppression and domination of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank”.

It adds that this amounts to a violation of Israel’s obligations under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) to prevent racial segregation and apartheid in territories under its jurisdiction.

The reports says systemic discrimination against Palestinians has been “a long-standing concern” for the UN but that it has “drastically deteriorated” since at least December 2022 and especially since the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on 7 October 2023, which sparked the Gaza war.

It also says that Israel’s settlement expansion in the West Bank had intensified over the past two years, citing the approval last month of the construction of 19 new settlements, which Israeli ministers said was about blocking the establishment of a Palestinian state.

“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,” Türk warned.