The Palestinian Authority on Tuesday night welcomed the newly released report by Amnesty International accusing Israel of apartheid, and urged the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council to impose sanctions on the Jewish state. The P.A. also called on the International Criminal Court at The Hague to launch an investigation into Israel’s “crime against humanity of apartheid without delay.”
The P.A. Foreign Ministry said in a statement that “Amnesty International joins a long list of distinguished Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations and experts in exposing Israel’s colonial occupation for what it is: an institutionalized system of oppression and domination over the Palestinian people, designed to legitimize its colonial settlement expansion, deny the Palestinian people their inalienable right to self-determination, and erase Palestinian history, present, and future in their homeland.”
It described the report as “a detailed affirmation of the cruel reality of entrenched racism, exclusion, oppression, colonialism, apartheid and attempted erasure that the Palestinian people have endured since the [1948] nakba [‘catastrophe’].”
The Palestinians will continue to “exercise their legitimate right to oppose and resist all forms of occupation, colonization, dehumanization, racism, and apartheid until they achieve justice and realize their rights to self-determination, return, freedom and independence,” the statement said.
Following the release of the Amnesty report, the second by an international rights group in less than a year to accuse it of pursuing a policy of apartheid, Israel said it “consolidates and recycles lies” from hate groups and was designed to “pour fuel onto the fire of anti-Semitism.”
This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Israel Hayom.
