UN accuses Israel of West Bank 'apartheid'

The United Nations on Wednesday said decades of discrimination and segregation of Palestinians by Israel in the West Bank were intensifying, and called on the country to end its "apartheid system".

In a new report, the UN rights office said the "systematic discrimination" against Palestinians across the occupied Palestinian territories had "drastically deteriorated" in recent years.

"There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank," UN rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement.

"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," he added.

"This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation, that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before."

A number of independent experts affiliated with the UN have described the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories as an "apartheid" but this marks the first time a UN rights chief has applied the term.

Mounting settler violence

Wednesday's report said the Israeli authorities "treat Israeli settlers and Palestinians residing in the West Bank under two distinct bodies of law and policies, resulting 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," it added.

This had led to "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".

Turk demanded Wednesday that Israel "repeal all laws, policies and practices that perpetuate systemic discrimination against Palestinians based on race, religion or ethnic origin".

The discrimination was compounded by continuing and escalating settler violence, in many cases "with the acquiescence, support and participation of Israel's security forces", the rights office said.

More than 500,000 Israelis currently live in settlements in the West Bank, occupied since 1967 and home to around three million Palestinians.

Violence has risen in recent years, surging especially since Hamas's October 7, 2023 attack, which triggered the Gaza war.

Since the start of the war, Israeli troops and settlers have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank, including many militants as well as dozens of civilians, according to an AFP tally based on figures from the Palestinian health ministry.

According to official Israeli figures, at least 44 Israelis, both soldiers and civilians, have been killed in Palestinian attacks or Israeli military operations in the same period.

'Almost complete impunity'

Since the Gaza war began, Israeli authorities had also "further expanded the use of unlawful force, arbitrary detention and torture", the report said.

Increased "repression of civil society and undue restrictions on media freedoms (and) severe movement restrictions" had also characterised "an unprecedented deterioration of the human rights situation" in the West Bank, it said.

There had also been rapid expansions of settlements, considered illegal under international law, even as unlawful killings of Palestinians were taking place "with almost complete impunity", the report warned.

Of the more than 1,500 killings of Palestinians that took place between the start of 2017 and September 30 last year, Israeli authorities had opened just 112 investigations, resulting in only one conviction, it pointed out.

Thousands of Palestinians meanwhile remain arbitrarily detained by Israeli authorities, mostly under so-called "administrative detention", without charge or trial, it said.

The report said it had found "reasonable grounds to believe that this separation, segregation, and subordination is intended to be permanent... to maintain oppression and domination of Palestinians".

This, it stressed, amounts to a violation of an international anti-racism convention, "which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid".

The UN rights office on Wednesday urged Israel to end its "unlawful presence in the occupied Palestinian territory, including by dismantling all settlements and evacuating all settlers, and to respect the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination".