by Ismail Khader
JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Amnesty International accuses Israel of imposing an apartheid regime on the Palestinians, in a report released on Tuesday that denounces systematic policies of segregation and dispossession that the organization calls a “crime against humanity”. .
Amnesty relies on a 211-page report which details the measures of “territorial segregation and movement restrictions, massive seizures of land and real estate, forced evictions, arbitrary detentions, torture, unlawful killings”.
“After extensive research, our new report demonstrates that the laws, policies and practices put in place by the Israeli authorities have gradually created a system of apartheid against the Palestinian people as a whole,” writes the NGO. based in London.
Amnesty is the second major human rights organization to accuse Israel of apartheid and crimes against humanity in less than a year, following Human Rights Watch last April.
The Israeli government has reacted strongly to this new challenge, accusing Amnesty of “supporting and recycling the lies” propagated by groups which seek to “pour oil on the fire of anti-Semitism”, and of thus seeking to “delegitimize Israel”.
Palestinian movements, on the other hand, applauded the publication of the report.
Examples in support, Amnesty accuses Israel of having set up “through discriminatory laws and policies”, “a system of oppression and institutionalized domination against the Palestinian people”.
“If these violations are more frequent and more serious in the occupied Palestinian territories, they are also committed in Israel and against Palestinian refugees, present in third countries”, notes the report.
LEGAL DEFINITION OF CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY
The policies denounced by Amnesty range from movement restrictions imposed on Palestinians in the occupied territories to the banning of the return of refugees, to the underinvestment that leads to the impoverishment of Arab communities living on Israeli territory.
“Our research shows that this system corresponds to the legal definition of apartheid”, insists Amnesty, which also documents forced evictions, acts of torture and unlawful killings (often qualified as “targeted eliminations” by Israel).
This whole system of domination constitutes “a crime against humanity defined by the Convention on Apartheid of 1973 and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court of 1998”, concludes the NGO.
In a statement, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid said that “Israel is not perfect, but it is a democracy that respects international laws”, where the press and justice are free.
“I hate to use the argument that if Israel weren’t a Jewish state, no one in Amnesty would dare to criticize it, but in this case that’s the only explanation,” he added.
Bassam al-Salhe, a member of the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), said the report “confirms and reinforces the Palestinian position on the nature of the Israeli occupation measures. It reflects the reality of the situation on the ground.”
(Report by Dominic Evans, French version Tangi Salaün, edited by Sophie Louet)