Israel is committing the crimes of apartheid and persecution against Arabs in the occupied territories and Israel itself, Human Rights Watch says as quoted by BBC.
In a new report, it says Israel has a policy “to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians”, including those who are its citizens.
The New York-based rights group said Israel’s dual policies, codified in its laws, had privileged Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians. Apartheid amounts to state-sanctioned racial discrimination and is considered a crime against humanity.
“The finding is based on overarching Israeli government policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians and grave abuses committed against Palestinians living in the occupied territory, including East Jerusalem,” HRW said.
The rights group said it based its documentation of Israel’s abuses against the Palestinians after years of reviewing the Israeli government planning documents and statements.
“In Jerusalem, for example, the [Israeli] government’s plan for the municipality, including both the west and occupied east parts of the city, sets the goal of ‘maintaining a solid Jewish majority in the city’ and even specifies the demographic ratios it hopes to maintain.”
Israel’s foreign ministry has rejected the report as “preposterous and false”. It accused Human Rights Watch of having a “long-standing anti-Israeli agenda” and carrying out an ongoing campaign “with no connection to facts or reality on the ground”.
Commenting on the report, HRW executive director Kenneth Roth said “denying millions of Palestinians their fundamental rights, without any legitimate security justification and solely because they are Palestinian and not Jewish, is not simply a matter of an abusive occupation.”
Roth said Israel’s policy is meant “to privilege one people at the expense of another.”
HRW concluded by urging countries to condition arms sales and military and security assistance to Israel “on Israeli authorities taking concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of these crimes.”
Israel’s Arab minority comprise just over 20% of its population, while at least 2.5 million Palestinians live in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and 350,000 in Israeli-occupied East Jerusalem. About 1.9 million Palestinians live in the Gaza Strip, which the UN considers to also be occupied by Israel.
Israel occupied the territories in the 1967 Middle East war. It pulled out of Gaza in 2005, but still controls most of its borders, as well as its airspace and waters off its coast.
Israel is also facing a war crimes investigation by the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor over its military operation in Gaza in the summer of 2014 and Israel’s settlement policy in occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
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