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from Hassoum Ceesay (NCAC- Gambia)

For a country in transition like ours,  working on a new constitution, the issue of religious diversity is crucial. In our case, secularity became a fractionalizing element that is impeding the formalisation of the new constitution, since part of the muslim population will not accept it.

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from Emir:

Violence against Bosnian Muslims lies in two overlapping processes: the reconceptualisation of Bosnian Muslims’ identity and the mainstreaming of the intent to annihilate them.

The reconceptualisation of identity refers to the process by which the victim group is portrayed as “lying outside the political community”, as “an almost superhumanly powerful enemy whose continued existence threatens the very survival of the political community”, or paradoxically as sub- or non-human, according to political scientist Maureen S. Hiebert.

Karadzic had a wealth of imagery and heritage to draw on in reconceptualising Bosnian Muslims; from the early 19th Century to the formation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia to the Second World War, “the Muslims in the Balkans sometimes became viewed as a kind of ethnic ‘fifth column’, left over from a previous era, who could never be integrated successfully into the planned future national states”, historian Cathie Carmichael wrote in her article ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Slav Muslims and its Role in Serbian and Montenegrin Discourses since 1800’.

Islam was the element of the Bosnian Muslims’ identity that lent itself most to reconceptualisation. It was therefore used by the Serb elites to construct Bosnian Muslims as a mortal threat that must be physically removed from the projected Serb states to be built on the ruins of Yugoslavia. Both as a prelude to violence as well as when it started in earnest, the motif of ‘the Turk’ was prevalent.

Religion is  a dangerous instrument in the hands of a cynical political class who goes after the destruction of another group. Then, the prospective of genocide rises on the horizon

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Targeting 'Turks': How Karadzic Laid the Foundations for Genocide | Balkan Insight

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I was 14 years old the first time I was called a Turk. It was used as a slur, a swear word, an insult. I only knew about Turks from history lessons as foreign occupiers. I had never seen an actual Turk up to that point in my life.

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About 6.8 million Jewish Israelis and 6.8 million Palestinians live today between the Mediterranean Sea and Jordan River, an area encompassing Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the latter made up of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip. Throughout most of this area, Israel is the sole governing power; in the remainder, it exercises primary authority alongside limited Palestinian self-rule. Across these areas and in most aspects of life, Israeli authorities methodically privilege Jewish Israelis and discriminate against Palestinians. Laws, policies, and statements by leading Israeli officials make plain that the objective of maintaining Jewish Israeli control over demographics, political power, and land has long guided government policy. In pursuit of this goal, authorities have dispossessed, confined, forcibly separated, and subjugated Palestinians by virtue of their identity to varying degrees of intensity. In certain areas, as described in this report, these deprivations are so severe that they amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

Several widely held assumptions, including that the occupation is temporary, that the "peace process" will soon bring an end to Israeli abuses, that Palestinians have meaningful control over their lives in the West Bank and Gaza, and that Israel is an egalitarian democracy inside its borders, have obscured the reality of Israel's entrenched discriminatory rule over Palestinians. Israel has maintained military rule over some portion of the Palestinian population for all but six months of its 73-year history. It did so over the vast majority of Palestinians inside Israel from 1948 and until 1966. From 1967 until the present, it has militarily ruled over Palestinians in the OPT, excluding East Jerusalem. By contrast, it has since its founding governed all Jewish Israelis, including settlers in the OPT since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, under its more rights-respecting civil law.

For the past 54 years, Israeli authorities have facilitated the transfer of Jewish Israelis to the OPT and granted them a superior status under the law as compared to Palestinians living in the same territory when it comes to civil rights, access to land, and freedom to move, build, and confer residency rights to close relatives. While Palestinians have a limited degree of self-rule in parts of the OPT, Israel retains primary control over borders, airspace, the movement of people and goods, security, and the registry of the entire population, which in turn dictates such matters as legal status and eligibility to receive identity cards.

A number of Israeli officials have stated clearly their intent to maintain this control in perpetuity and backed it up through their actions, including continued settlement expansion over the course of the decades-long "peace process." Unilateral annexation of additional parts of the West Bank, which the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to carry out, would formalize the reality of systematic Israeli domination and oppression that has long prevailed without changing the reality that the entire West Bank is occupied territory under the international law of occupation, including East Jerusalem, which Israel unilaterally annexed in 1967.

International criminal law has developed two crimes against humanity for situations of systematic discrimination and repression: apartheid and persecution. Crimes against humanity stand among the most odious crimes in international law.

The international community has over the years detached the term apartheid from its original South African context, developed a universal legal prohibition against its practice, and recognized it as a crime against humanity with definitions provided in the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid ("Apartheid Convention") and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The crime against humanity of persecution, also set out in the Rome Statute, the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights on racial, ethnic, and other grounds, grew out of the post-World War II trials and constitutes one of the most serious international crimes, of the same gravity as apartheid.

The State of Palestine is a state party to both the Rome Statute and the Apartheid Convention. In February 2021, the ICC ruled that it has jurisdiction over serious international crimes committed in the entirety of the OPT, including East Jerusalem, which would include the crimes against humanity of apartheid or persecution committed in that territory. In March 2021, the ICC Office of Prosecutor announced the opening of a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine.

In this report, Human Rights Watch examines the extent to which that threshold has already been crossed in certain of the areas where Israeli authorities exercise control.

Definitions of Apartheid and Persecution

The prohibition of institutionalized discrimination, especially on grounds of race or ethnicity, constitutes one of the fundamental elements of international law. Most states have agreed to treat the worst forms of such discrimination, that is, persecution and apartheid, as crimes against humanity, and have given the ICC the power to prosecute these crimes when national authorities are unable or unwilling to pursue them. Crimes against humanity consist of specific criminal acts committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack, or acts committed pursuant to a state or organizational policy, directed against a civilian population.

The Apartheid Convention defines the crime against humanity of apartheid as "inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them." The Rome Statute of the ICC adopts a similar definition: "inhumane acts... committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime." The Rome Statute does not further define what constitutes an "institutionalized regime."

The crime of apartheid under the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute consists of three primary elements: an intent to maintain a system of domination by one racial group over another; systematic oppression by one racial group over another; and one or more inhumane acts, as defined, carried out on a widespread or systematic basis pursuant to those policies.

Among the inhumane acts identified in either the Convention or the Rome Statute are "forcible transfer," "expropriation of landed property," "creation of separate reserves and ghettos," and denial of the "the right to leave and to return to their country, [and] the right to a nationality."

The Rome Statute identifies the crime against humanity of persecution as "the intentional and severe deprivation of fundamental rights contrary to international law by reason of the identity of the group or collectivity," including on racial, national, or ethnic grounds. Customary international law identifies the crime of persecution as consisting of two primary elements: (1) severe abuses of fundamental rights committed on a widespread or systematic basis, and (2) with discriminatory intent.

Few courts have heard cases involving the crime of persecution and none the crime of apartheid, resulting in a lack of case law around the meanings of key terms in their definitions. As described in the report, international criminal courts have over the last two decades evaluated group identity based on the context and construction by local actors, as opposed to earlier approaches focused on hereditary physical traits. In international human rights law, including the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), race and racial discrimination have been broadly interpreted to include distinctions based on descent, and national or ethnic origin, among other categories.

Application to Israel's Policies towards Palestinians

Two primary groups live today in Israel and the OPT: Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. One primary sovereign, the Israeli government, rules over them.

Intent to Maintain Domination

A stated aim of the Israeli government is to ensure that Jewish Israelis maintain domination across Israel and the OPT. The Knesset in 2018 passed a law with constitutional status affirming Israel as the "nation-state of the Jewish people," declaring that within that territory, the right to self-determination "is unique to the Jewish people," and establishing "Jewish settlement" as a national value. To sustain Jewish Israeli control, Israeli authorities have adopted policies aimed at mitigating what they have openly described as a demographic "threat" that Palestinians pose. Those policies include limiting the population and political power of Palestinians, granting the right to vote only to Palestinians who live within the borders of Israel as they existed from 1948 to June 1967, and limiting the ability of Palestinians to move to Israel from the OPT and from anywhere else to Israel or the OPT. Other steps are taken to ensure Jewish domination, including a state policy of "separation" of Palestinians between the West Bank and Gaza, which prevents the movement of people and goods within the OPT, and "Judaization" of areas with significant Palestinian populations, including Jerusalem as well as the Galilee and the Negev in Israel. This policy, which aims to maximize Jewish Israeli control over land, concentrates the majority of Palestinians who live outside Israel's major, predominantly Jewish cities into dense, under-served enclaves and restricts their access to land and housing, while nurturing the growth of nearby Jewish communities.

Systematic Oppression and Institutional Discrimination

To implement the goal of domination, the Israeli government institutionally discriminates against Palestinians. The intensity of that discrimination varies according to different rules established by the Israeli government in Israel, on the one hand, and different parts of the OPT, on the other, where the most severe form takes place.

In the OPT, which Israel has recognized as a single territory encompassing the West Bank and Gaza, Israeli authorities treat Palestinians separately and unequally as compared to Jewish Israeli settlers. In the occupied West Bank, Israel subjects Palestinians to draconian military law and enforces segregation, largely prohibiting Palestinians from entering settlements. In the besieged Gaza Strip, Israel imposes a generalized closure, sharply restricting the movement of people and goods-policies that Gaza's other neighbor, Egypt, often does little to alleviate. In annexed East Jerusalem, which Israel considers part of its sovereign territory but remains occupied territory under international law, Israel provides the vast majority of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians living there with a legal status that weakens their residency rights by conditioning them on the individual's connections to the city, among other factors. This level of discrimination amounts to systematic oppression.

In Israel, which the vast majority of nations consider being the area defined by its pre-1967 borders, the two tiered-citizenship structure and bifurcation of nationality and citizenship result in Palestinian citizens having a status inferior to Jewish citizens by law. While Palestinians in Israel, unlike those in the OPT, have the right to vote and stand for Israeli elections, these rights do not empower them to overcome the institutional discrimination they face from the same Israeli government, including widespread restrictions on accessing land confiscated from them, home demolitions, and effective prohibitions on family reunification.

The fragmentation of the Palestinian population, in part deliberately engineered through Israeli restrictions on movement and residency, furthers the goal of domination and helps obscure the reality of the same Israeli government repressing the same Palestinian population group, to varying degrees in different areas, for the benefit of the same Jewish Israeli dominant group.

Inhumane Acts and Other Abuses of Fundamental Rights

Pursuant to these policies, Israeli authorities have carried out a range of inhumane acts in the OPT. Those include sweeping restrictions on the movement of 4.7 million Palestinians there; the confiscation of much of their land; the imposition of harsh conditions, including categorical denial of building permits in large parts of the West Bank, which has led thousands of Palestinians to leave their homes under conditions that amount to forcible transfer; the denial of residency rights to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and their relatives, largely for being abroad when the occupation began in 1967, or for long periods during the first few decades of the occupation, or as a result of the effective freeze on family reunification over the last two decades; and the suspension of basic civil rights, such as freedom of assembly and association, depriving Palestinians of the opportunity to have a voice in a wide range of affairs that most affect their daily lives and futures. Many of these abuses, including categorical denials of building permits, mass residency revocations or restrictions, and large-scale land confiscations, have no legitimate security justifications; others, such as the extent of restrictions on movement and civil rights, fail any reasonable balancing test between security concerns and the severity of the underlying rights abuse.

Since the founding of the state of Israel, the government also has systematically discriminated against and violated the rights of Palestinians inside the state's pre-1967 borders, including by refusing to allow Palestinians access to the millions of dunams of land (1000 dunams equals 100 hectares, about 250 acres or 1 square kilometer) that were confiscated from them. In one region-the Negev-these policies make it virtually impossible for tens of thousands of Palestinians to live lawfully in the communities they have lived in for decades. In addition, Israeli authorities refuse to permit the more than 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled in 1948, and their descendants, to return to Israel or the OPT, and impose blanket restrictions on legal residency, which block many Palestinian spouses and families from living together in Israel.

Report Findings

This report examines Israeli policies and practices towards Palestinians in the OPT and Israel and compares them to the treatment of Jewish Israelis living in the same territories. It is not an exhaustive evaluation of all types of international human rights and humanitarian law violations. Rather, it surveys consequential Israeli government practices and policies that violate the basic rights of Palestinians and whose purpose is to ensure the domination of Jewish Israelis, and assesses them against the definitions of the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

The report draws on years of research and documentation by Human Rights Watch and other rights organizations, including fieldwork conducted for this report. Human Rights Watch also reviewed Israeli laws, government planning documents, statements by officials, and land records. This evidentiary record was then analyzed under the legal standards for the crimes of apartheid and persecution. Human Rights Watch also wrote in July 2020 to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, soliciting the government's perspectives on the issues covered, but, as of publication, had not received a response.

The report does not set out to compare Israel with South Africa under apartheid or to determine whether Israel is an "apartheid state"-a concept that is not defined in international law. Rather, the report assesses whether specific acts and policies carried out by Israeli authorities today amount in particular areas to the crimes of apartheid and persecution as defined under international law.

Each of the report's three main substantive chapters explores Israel's rule over Palestinians: the dynamics of its rule and discrimination, looking in turn at Israel and the OPT, the particular rights abuses that it commits there, and some of the objectives that motivate these policies. It does so in terms of the primary elements of the crimes of apartheid and persecution, as outlined above. Human Rights Watch evaluates the dynamics of Israeli rule in each of these areas, keeping in mind the different legal frameworks that apply in the OPT and Israel, which are the two legally recognized territorial entities, each with a different status under international law. While noting significant factual differences among subregions in each of these two territories, the report does not make separate subregional determinations.

On the basis of its research, Human Rights Watch concludes that the Israeli government has demonstrated an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians across Israel and the OPT. In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.

Israeli officials have also committed the crime against humanity of persecution. This finding is based on the discriminatory intent behind Israel's treatment of Palestinians and the grave abuses carried out in the OPT that include the widespread confiscation of privately owned land, the effective prohibition on building or living in many areas, the mass denial of residency rights, and sweeping, decades-long restrictions on the freedom of movement and basic civil rights. Such policies and practices intentionally and severely deprive millions of Palestinians of key fundamental rights, including to residency, private property, and access to land, services, and resources, on a widespread and systematic basis by virtue of their identity as Palestinians.

Seeking Maximal Land with Minimal Palestinians

Israeli policy has sought to engineer and maximize the number of Jews, as well as the land available to them, in Israel and the portions of the OPT coveted by the Israeli government for Jewish settlement. At the same time, by restricting the residency rights of Palestinians, Israeli policy seeks to minimize the number of Palestinians and the land available to them in those areas. The level of repression is most severe in the OPT, although often less severe aspects of similar policies can be found within Israel.

In the West Bank, authorities have confiscated more than 2 million dunams of land from Palestinians, making up more than one-third of the West Bank, including tens of thousands of dunams that they acknowledge are privately owned by Palestinians. One common tactic they have used is to declare territory, including privately-owned Palestinian land, as "state land." The Israeli group Peace Now estimates that the Israeli government has designated about 1.4 million dunams of land, or about a quarter of the West Bank, as state land. The group has also found that more than 30 percent of the land used for settlements is acknowledged by the Israeli government as having been privately owned by Palestinians. Of the more than 675,000 dunams of state land that Israeli authorities have allocated for use by third parties in the West Bank, they have earmarked more than 99 percent for use by Israeli civilians, according to government data. Land grabs for settlements and the infrastructure that primarily serves settlers effectively concentrate Palestinians in the West Bank, according to B'Tselem, into "165 non-contiguous 'territorial islands.'"

Israeli authorities have also made it virtually impossible in practice for Palestinians in Area C, the roughly 60 percent of the West Bank that the Oslo Accords placed under full Israeli control, as well as those in East Jerusalem, to obtain building permits. In Area C, for example, authorities approved less than 1.5 percent of applications by Palestinians to build between 2016 and 2018-21 in total-a figure 100 times smaller than the number of demolition orders it issued in the same period, according to official data. Israeli authorities have razed thousands of Palestinian properties in these areas for lacking a permit, leaving thousands of families displaced. By contrast, according to Peace Now, Israeli authorities began construction on more than 23,696 housing units between 2009 and 2020 in Israeli settlements in Area C. Transfer of an occupying power's civilian population to an occupied territory violates the Fourth Geneva Convention.

These policies grow out of longstanding Israeli government plans. For example, the 1980 Drobles Plan, which guided the government's settlement policy in the West Bank at the time and built on prior plans, called for authorities to "settle the land between the [Arab] minority population centers and their surroundings," noting that doing so would make it "hard for Palestinians to create territorial contiguity and political unity" and "remove any trace of doubt about our intention to control Judea and Samaria forever."

In Jerusalem, the government's plan for the municipality, including both the west and occupied east of the city, sets the goal of "maintaining a solid Jewish majority in the city" and a target demographic "ratio of 70% Jews and 30% Arabs"-later adjusted to a 60:40 ratio after authorities acknowledged that "this goal is not attainable" in light of "the demographic trend."

The Israeli government has also carried out discriminatory seizures of land inside Israel. Authorities have seized through different mechanisms at least 4.5 million dunams of land from Palestinians, according to historians, constituting 65 to 75 percent of all land owned by Palestinians before 1948 and 40 to 60 percent of the land that belonged to Palestinians who remained after 1948 and became citizens of Israel. Authorities in the early years of the state declared land belonging to displaced Palestinians as "absentee property" or "closed military zones," then took it over, converted it to state land, and built Jewish communities there. Authorities continue to block Palestinian citizen landowners from accessing land that was confiscated from them. A 2003 government-commissioned report found that "the expropriation activities were clearly and explicitly harnessed to the interests of the Jewish majority" and that state lands, which constitute 93 percent of all land in Israel, effectively serve the objective of "Jewish settlement." Since 1948, the government has authorized the creation of more than 900 "Jewish localities" in Israel, but it has allowed only a handful of government-planned townships and villages for Palestinians, created largely to concentrate previously displaced Bedouin communities living in the Negev.

Land confiscations and other discriminatory land policies in Israel hem in Palestinian municipalities inside Israel, denying them opportunities for natural expansion enjoyed by Jewish municipalities. The vast majority of Palestinian citizens, who make up around 19 percent of the Israeli population, live in these municipalities, which have an estimated jurisdiction over less than 3 percent of all land in Israel. While Palestinians in Israel can move freely, and some live in "mixed cities," such as Haifa, Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and Acre, Israeli law permits small towns to exclude prospective residents based on their asserted incompatibility with the town's "social-cultural fabric." According to a study by a professor at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, there are more than 900 small Jewish towns, including kibbutzim, across Israel that can restrict who lives there. None of them have any Palestinians living among them.

In the Negev in Israel, Israeli authorities have refused to legally recognize 35 Palestinian Bedouin communities, making it impossible for their 90,000 or so residents to live lawfully in the communities they have lived in for decades. Instead, authorities have sought to concentrate Bedouin communities in larger recognized townships in order, as expressed in governmental plans and statements by officials, to maximize the land available for Jewish communities. Israeli law considers all buildings in these unrecognized villages to be illegal, and authorities have refused to connect most to the national electricity or water grids or to provide even basic infrastructure such as paved roads or sewage systems. The communities do not appear on official maps, most have no educational facilities, and residents live under constant threat of having their homes demolished. Israeli authorities demolished more than 10,000 Bedouin homes in the Negev between 2013 and 2019, according to government data. They razed one unrecognized village that challenged the expropriation of its lands, al-Araqib, 185 times.

Authorities have implemented these policies pursuant to government plans since the early years of the state that called for restricting Bedouin communities in order to secure land suitable for settling Jews. Several months before becoming prime minister in December 2000, Ariel Sharon declared that Bedouins in the Negev "are gnawing at the country's land reserves," which he described as "a demographic phenomenon." As prime minister, Sharon went on to pursue a multi-billion-dollar plan that transparently sought to boost the Jewish population in the Negev and Galilee regions of Israel, areas that have significant Palestinian populations. His deputy prime minister, Shimon Peres, later described the plan as a "battle for the future for the Jewish people."

Sharon's push to Judaize the Negev, as well as the Galilee, developed against the backdrop of the government's decision to withdraw Jewish settlers from Gaza. After ending Jewish settlement there, Israel began to treat Gaza effectively as a territorial jurisdiction whose population it could consider as outside the demographic calculus of Jews and Palestinians who live in Israel and in the vast majority of the OPT-the West Bank including East Jerusalem-that Israel intends to retain. Israeli officials at the time acknowledged the demographic objectives behind the move. Amid the push to withdraw settlers from Gaza, Sharon said in an August 2005 address to Israelis, "Gaza cannot be held onto forever. Over one million Palestinians live there and they double their numbers with every generation." Peres said the same month, "We are disengaging from Gaza because of demography."

Despite withdrawing its settlers and ground troops, Israel has remained in critical ways the supreme power in Gaza, dominating through other means and hence maintaining its legal obligations as an occupying power, as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations (UN), among others, have determined. Most significantly, Israel bans Palestinians living there (with only narrow exceptions) from leaving through the Erez Passenger Crossing it controls and instituted a formal "policy of separation" between Gaza and the West Bank, despite Israel having recognized within the framework of the Oslo Accords these two parts of the OPT as collectively forming a "single territorial unit." The generalized travel ban, which has remained in place since 2007 and reduced travel out of Gaza to a fraction of what it was two decades ago, is not based on an individualized security assessment and fails any reasonable test of balancing security concerns against the right to freedom of movement for over two million people.

Authorities have also sharply restricted the entry and exit of goods to and from Gaza, which, alongside Egypt often shutting its border, effectively seals it off from the outside world. These restrictions have contributed to limiting access to basic services, devastating the economy, and making 80 percent of the population reliant on humanitarian aid. Families in Gaza in recent years have had to make do without centrally provided electricity for between 12 and 20 hours per day, depending on the period. Water is also critically scarce; the UN considers more than 96 percent of the water supply in Gaza "unfit for human consumption."

Within the West Bank as well, Israeli authorities prohibit Palestinian ID holders from entering areas such as East Jerusalem, lands beyond the separation barrier, and areas controlled by settlements and the army, unless they secure difficult-to-obtain permits. They have also erected nearly 600 permanent obstacles, many between Palestinian communities, that disrupt daily life for Palestinians. In sharp contrast, Israeli authorities allow Jewish settlers in the West Bank to move freely within the majority of the West Bank under its exclusive control, as well as to and from Israel, on roads built to facilitate their commutes and integrate them into every facet of Israeli life.

Demographic considerations factor centrally in Israel's separation policy between Gaza and the West Bank. In particular, in the rare cases when they allow movement between the two parts of the OPT, Israeli authorities permit it predominantly in the direction of Gaza, thereby facilitating population flow away from the area where Israel actively promotes Jewish settlement. The Israeli army's official policy states that while a West Bank resident can apply "for permanent resettlement in the Gaza Strip for any purpose that is considered humanitarian (usually family reunification)," Gaza residents can settle in the West Bank only "in the rarest cases," usually related to family reunification. In these cases, authorities are mandated to aim to resettle the couple in Gaza. Official data shows that Israel did not approve a single Gaza resident to resettle in the West Bank, outside of a handful who filed Supreme Court petitions between 2009 and March 2017, while permitting several dozen West Bank residents to relocate to Gaza on the condition that they sign a pledge not to return to the West Bank.

Beyond the closure policy, Israeli authorities have often used oppressive and indiscriminate means during hostilities and protests in Gaza. Since 2008, the Israeli army has launched three large-scale military offensives in Gaza in the context of hostilities with armed Palestinian groups. As described in the report, those offensives have included apparently deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure and killed well over 2,000 civilians. In addition, Israeli forces have regularly fired on Palestinian demonstrators and others who have approached fences separating Gaza and Israel in circumstances when they did not pose an imminent threat to life, killing 214 demonstrators in 2018 and 2019 alone and maiming thousands. These practices stem from a decades-long pattern of using excessive and vastly disproportionate force to quell protests and disturbances, at great cost to civilians. Despite the frequency of such incidents over the years, Israeli authorities have failed to develop law enforcement tactics that comport with international human rights norms.

Discriminatory Restrictions on Residency and Nationality

Palestinians face discriminatory restrictions on their rights to residency and nationality to varying degrees in the OPT and Israel. Israeli authorities have used their control over the population registry in the West Bank and Gaza-the list of Palestinians they consider lawful residents for purposes of issuing legal status and identity cards-to deny residency to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. Israeli authorities refused to register at least 270,000 Palestinians who were outside the West Bank and Gaza when the occupation began in 1967 and revoked the residency of nearly 250,000, mostly for being abroad for too long between 1967 and 1994. Since 2000, Israeli authorities have largely refused to process family reunification applications or requests for address changes by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. The freeze effectively bars Palestinians from acquiring legal status for spouses or relatives not already registered and makes illegal, according to the Israeli army, the presence in the West Bank of thousands of Gaza residents who arrived on temporary permits and now live there, since they effectively cannot change their address to one in the West Bank. These restrictions have the effect of limiting the Palestinian population in the West Bank.

Authorities regularly deny entry into the West Bank to non-registered Palestinians who had lived in the West Bank but left temporarily (to study, work, marry, or for other reasons) and to their non-registered spouses and other family members.

When Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, it applied its 1952 Law of Entry to Palestinians who lived there and designated them as "permanent residents," the same status afforded to a non-Jewish foreigner who moves to Israel. The Interior Ministry has revoked this status from at least 14,701 Palestinians since 1967, mostly for failing to prove a "center of life" in the city. A path to Israeli citizenship exists, but few apply and most who did in recent years were not granted citizenship. By contrast, Jewish Israelis in Jerusalem, including settlers in East Jerusalem, are citizens who do not have to prove connections to the city to maintain their status.

Inside Israel, Israel's Proclamation of Independence affirms the "complete equality" of all residents, but a two-track citizenship structure contradicts that vow and effectively regards Jews and Palestinians separately and unequally. Israel's 1952 Citizenship Law contains a separate track exclusively for Jews to obtain automatic citizenship. That law grows out of the 1950 Law of Return which guarantees Jewish citizens of other countries the right to settle in Israel. By contrast, the track for Palestinians conditions citizenship on proving residency before 1948 in the territory that became Israel, inclusion in the population registry as of 1952, and a continuous presence in Israel or legal entry in the period between 1948 and 1952. Authorities have used this language to deny residency rights to the more than 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled in 1948 and their descendants, who today number more than 5.7 million. This law creates a reality where a Jewish citizen of any other country who has never been to Israel can move there and automatically gain citizenship, while a Palestinian expelled from his home and languishing for more than 70 years in a refugee camp in a nearby country, cannot.

The 1952 Citizenship Law also authorizes granting citizenship based on naturalization. However, in 2003, the Knesset passed the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order), which bars granting Israeli citizenship or long-term legal status to Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza who marry Israeli citizens or residents. With few exceptions, this law, renewed every year since and upheld by the Israeli Supreme Court, denies both Jewish and Palestinian citizens and residents of Israel who choose to marry Palestinians the right to live with their partner in Israel. This restriction, based solely on the spouse's identity as a Palestinian from the West Bank or Gaza, notably does not apply when Israelis marry non-Jewish spouses of most other foreign nationalities. They can receive immediate status and, after several years, apply for citizenship.

Commenting on a 2005 renewal of the law, the prime minister at the time, Ariel Sharon, said: "There's no need to hide behind security arguments. There's a need for the existence of a Jewish state." Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then the finance minister, said during discussions at the time: "Instead of making it easier for Palestinians who want to get citizenship, we should make the process much more difficult, in order to guarantee Israel's security and a Jewish majority in Israel." In March 2019, this time as prime minister, Netanyahu declared, "Israel is not a state of all its citizens," but rather "the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them."

International human rights law gives broad latitude to governments in setting their immigration policies. There is nothing in international law to bar Israel from promoting Jewish immigration. Jewish Israelis, many of whom historically migrated to Mandatory Palestine or later to Israel to escape anti-Semitic persecution in different parts of the world, are entitled to protection of their safety and fundamental rights. However, that latitude does not give a state the prerogative to discriminate against people who already live in that country, including with respect to rights concerning family reunification, and against people who have a right to return to the country. Palestinians are also entitled to protection of their safety and fundamental rights.

Israeli Justifications of Policies and Practices

Israeli authorities justify many of the policies documented in this report as responses to Palestinian anti-Israeli violence. Many policies, though, like the denial of building permits in Area C, East Jerusalem, and the Negev in Israel, residency revocations for Jerusalemites, or expropriation of privately owned land and discriminatory allocation of state lands, have no legitimate security justification. Others, including the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law and freeze of the OPT population registry, use security as a pretext to advance demographic objectives.

Israeli authorities do face legitimate security challenges in Israel and the OPT. However, restrictions that do not seek to balance human rights such as freedom of movement against legitimate security concerns by, for example, conducting individualized security assessments rather than barring the entire population of Gaza from leaving with only rare exceptions, go far beyond what international law permits. Even where security forms part of the motivation behind a particular policy, that does not give Israel a carte blanche to violate human rights en masse. Legitimate security concerns can be present among policies that amount to apartheid, just as they can be present in a policy that sanctions the use of excessive force or torture.

Officials sometimes claim that measures taken in the OPT are temporary and would be rescinded in the context of a peace agreement. From former Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, of the Labor Party, declaring in July 1967 that "I see only a quasi-independent region [for Palestinians], because the security and land are in Israeli hands," to Netanyahu of the Likud in July 2019 stating that "Israeli military and security forces will continue to rule the entire territory, up to the Jordan [River]," a range of officials have made clear their intent to maintain overriding control over the West Bank in perpetuity, regardless of what arrangements are in place to govern Palestinians. Their actions and policies further dispel the notion that Israeli authorities consider the occupation temporary, including the continuing of land confiscation, the building of the separation barrier in a way that accommodated anticipated growth of settlements, the seamless integration of the settlements' sewage system, communication networks, electrical grids, water infrastructure and a matrix of roads with Israel proper, as well as a growing body of laws applicable to West Bank Israeli settlers but not Palestinians. The possibility that a future Israeli leader might forge a deal with Palestinians that dismantles the discriminatory system and ends systematic repression does not negate the intent of current officials to maintain the current system, nor the current reality of apartheid and persecution.

Recommendations

The Israeli government should dismantle all forms of systematic domination and oppression that privilege Jewish Israelis and systematically repress Palestinians, and end the persecution of Palestinians. In particular, authorities should end discriminatory policies and practices with regards to citizenship and residency rights, civil rights, freedom of movement, allocation of land and resources, access to water, electricity, and other services, and granting of building permits.

The findings that the crimes of apartheid and persecution are being committed do not deny the reality of Israeli occupation or erase Israel's obligations under the law of occupation, any more than would a finding that other crimes against humanity or war crimes have been carried out. As such, Israeli authorities should cease building settlements and dismantle existing ones and otherwise provide Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza with full respect of their human rights, using as a benchmark the rights that it grants Israeli citizens, as well as the protections that international humanitarian law grants them.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) should end forms of security coordination with the Israeli army that contribute to facilitating the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

The finding of crimes against humanity should prompt the international community to reevaluate its approach to Israel and Palestine. The US, which for decades has largely failed to press the Israeli government to end its systematic repression of Palestinians, has in some instances in recent years signaled its support for serious abuses such as the building of settlements in the occupied West Bank. Many European and other states have built close ties with Israel, while supporting the "peace process," building the capacity of the PA, and distancing themselves from and sometimes criticizing specific abusive Israeli practices in the OPT. This approach, which overlooks the deeply entrenched nature of Israeli discrimination and repression of Palestinians there, minimizes serious human rights abuses by treating them as temporary symptoms of the occupation that the "peace process" will soon cure. It has enabled states to resist the sort of accountability that a situation of this gravity warrants, allowing apartheid to metastasize and consolidate. After 54 years, states should stop assessing the situation through the prism of what might happen should the languishing peace process one day be revived and focus instead on the longstanding reality on the ground that shows no signs of abating.

Crimes against humanity can serve as the basis for individual criminal liability in international fora, as well as in domestic courts outside of Israel and the OPT under the principle of universal jurisdiction.

In light of the decades-long failure by Israeli authorities to rein in serious abuses, the International Criminal Court's Office of the Prosecutor should investigate and prosecute individuals credibly implicated in the crimes against humanity of apartheid or persecution. The ICC has jurisdiction over, and the prosecutor has opened an investigation into, serious crimes committed in the OPT. In addition, all governments should investigate and prosecute those credibly implicated in these crimes, under the principle of universal jurisdiction and in accordance with national laws.

Beyond criminality, Human Rights Watch calls on states to establish through the UN an international commission of inquiry to investigate systematic discrimination and repression based on group identity in the OPT and Israel. The inquiry should be mandated to establish and analyze the facts; identify those responsible for serious crimes, including apartheid and persecution, with a view to ensuring that the perpetrators are held accountable; as well as collect and preserve evidence related to abuses for future use by credible judicial institutions.

States should also establish through the UN a position of UN global envoy for the crimes of persecution and apartheid with a mandate to mobilize international action to end persecution and apartheid worldwide.

States should issue statements expressing concern about Israel's practice of apartheid and persecution. They should vet agreements, cooperation schemes, and all forms of trade and dealing with Israel to screen for those directly contributing to the commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution against Palestinians, mitigate the human rights impacts, and, where not possible, end the activities and funding found to facilitate these serious crimes.

The implications of the findings of this report for businesses are complex and beyond the scope of this report. At a minimum, businesses should cease activities that directly contribute to the commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution. Companies should assess whether their goods or services contribute to the commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution, such as equipment used in the unlawful demolition of Palestinian homes, and cease providing goods and services that will likely be used for such purposes, in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

States should impose individual sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against officials and individuals responsible for the continued commission of these serious crimes and condition arms sales and military and security assistance to Israel on Israeli authorities taking concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

The international community has for too long explained away and turned a blind eye to the increasingly transparent reality on the ground. Every day a person is born in Gaza into an open-air prison, in the West Bank without civil rights, in Israel with an inferior status by law, and in neighboring countries effectively condemned to lifelong refugee status, like their parents and grandparents before them, solely because they are Palestinian and not Jewish. A future rooted in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all people living in Israel and the OPT will remain elusive so long as Israel's abusive practices against Palestinians persist.

While the report evaluates whether specific Israeli policies and practices amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution, it does not delve into the potential criminal liability of particular Israeli officials.

This report is based primarily on years of documentation carried out by Human Rights Watch, as well as by Israeli, Palestinian, and international human rights groups. Human Rights Watch also reviewed Israeli laws, government planning documents, statements by officials, land records, and legal standards governing the crimes of apartheid and persecution. The report includes several case studies, based on 40 interviews with affected persons, current and former officials, lawyers, and NGO representatives, as well as on-site visits, all conducted by Human Rights Watch in 2019 and 2020. Some interviews took place at locations in the OPT and Israel, but, in part due to movement restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic, many were conducted by phone.

Human Rights Watch conducted most of the interviews that are included in this report individually, in Arabic or English. We conducted them with the consent of those being interviewed and told each of the interviewees how Human Rights Watch would use the information provided.

Human Rights Watch is withholding names of some interviewees for their security, giving them instead pseudonyms, which are noted at first mention between quotation marks.

Human Rights Watch also wrote to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on July 20, 2020, soliciting the government's perspectives generally on the issues covered. A copy of the letter is included in the appendix of this report. The Prime Minister's Office confirmed receipt by phone on August 6 and by email on August 12, but, as of publication, had not responded.

In June 1967, Israel seized control of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, from Jordan and the Gaza Strip from Egypt, which make up the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), as well as the Golan Heights from Syria, and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, following an armed conflict known as the Six-Day War.

Israel also unilaterally annexed the Golan Heights in 1981, though it also remains an occupied territory under international law. Israel ended its occupation of the Sinai Peninsula as a result of the 1978 Camp David Accords with Egypt.

Although the mechanics and intensity of the abuses differ between the OPT and Israel, the same power, the government of the state of Israel, has primary control across both. That authority governs all Jewish Israelis in Israel and the OPT under a single body of laws (Israeli civil law) and, to ensure their domination, structurally discriminates against Palestinians and represses them to varying degrees across different areas on issues such as security of legal status and access to land and resources, as the report documents. Across Israel and the OPT, Israel grants Jewish Israelis privileges denied to Palestinians and deprives Palestinians of fundamental rights on account of their being Palestinian.

Among the 11 distinct crimes against humanity are the crimes of apartheid and persecution. There is no hierarchy among crimes against humanity; they are of the same gravity and lead to the same consequences under the Rome Statute.

Apartheid

General Prohibition

International Criminal Law

The term "the crime of apartheid", which shall include similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practiced in southern Africa, shall apply to the following inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them...

The Apartheid Convention then identifies a number of "inhuman acts" that, when committed for the purpose of domination and systematic oppression, make up the crime of apartheid, including:

(b) Deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part;

(c) Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognised trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association;

(d) Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof.

The Rome Statute of 1998, which has 123 states parties, identifies apartheid as a crime against humanity, defining it as:

Inhumane acts of a character similar to those referred to in paragraph 1, committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime.

Definition of Key Terms

No court has to date heard a case involving the crime of apartheid and therefore interpreted the meaning of the following terms as set out in the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute definitions of the crime of apartheid:

Racial Group: Both the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute use the term "racial group," but neither defines it. The development of the Apartheid Convention against the backdrop of events in southern Africa in the 1970s, as referenced in the text of the Convention, as well as the non-inclusion of other categories beyond race, and the rejection of proposals by some states to expand the treaty's scope, could lead to a narrower interpretation focused on divisions based on skin color. While discussion of the meaning of "racial group" during the drafting of the Rome Statute appears to have been minimal, its inclusion in the definition of apartheid, after the end of apartheid in South Africa and when international human rights law had clearly defined racial discrimination to include differences of ethnicity, descent, and national origin, indicates that "racial group" within the Rome Statute reflects, and would likely be interpreted by courts to reflect, a broader conception of race.

No international criminal case has ruled on the definition of "racial group" in the context of the crime against humanity of apartheid. But international criminal courts, in the context of more recent genocide cases, have addressed the meaning of "national, ethnical, racial or religious group" in the definition of that crime in part by evaluating group identity based on context and the construction of local actors, in particular the perpetrators, as opposed to earlier approaches that focused on hereditary physical traits. The International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) held that the assessment of whether a particular group may be considered as protected from the crime of genocide "will proceed on a case-by-case basis, taking into account both the evidence proffered and the political, social and cultural context." The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) also found that determinations should be "made on a case-by-case basis, consulting both objective and subjective criteria." The court, in particular, held that national, ethnic, racial or religious groups should be identified "by using as a criterion the stigmatisation of the group, notably by the perpetrators of the crime, on the basis of its perceived national, ethnical, racial or religious characteristics."The ICTY held in a 1999 case that "to attempt to define a national, ethnical or racial group today using objective and scientifically irreproachable criteria would be a perilous exercise."

Institutionalized Regime: This term, incorporated into the Rome Statute but not the Apartheid Convention, appears to have originated in a proposal from the US delegation during the drafting to limit the application of the crime of apartheid to states and exclude non-state groups. Alongside the term "systematic," which appears in both the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute, the term "regime" underscores the existence of formal organization and structure, and more than isolated discriminatory policies or acts. The system can cover entire states or more limited geographic areas, depending on the allocation of power, unity of authority, or differing oppressive laws, policies, and institutions, among other factors.

Domination: This term, which lacks a clear definition in law, appears in context to refer to an intent by one group to maintain heightened control over another, which can involve control over key levers of political power, land, and resources. The reference is found in both the Rome Statute and Apartheid Convention.

Systematic Oppression: This term, also without a clear definition in law, appears to refer to the methods used to carry out an intent to maintain domination. The reference in the Apartheid Convention to "policies and practices of racial discrimination as practiced in southern Africa" indicates that oppression must reach a high degree of intensity to meet the requisite threshold for the crime.

Persecution

Neither the Rome Statute nor customary international law clearly set the threshold of what constitutes a violation that is sufficiently "severe" or "egregious." Human Rights Watch recognizes that many human rights violations cause serious harm. However, for the determination of whether the crime against humanity of persecution has been committed, Human Rights Watch requires the most serious forms of violations before the requirements of "severe" or "egregious" can be met.

Legal Consequences of Finding Crimes Against Humanity

The commission of crimes against humanity can serve as the basis for individual criminal liability not only in the domestic courts of the perpetrator country but also in international courts and tribunals, as well as in domestic courts outside the country in question under the principle of universal jurisdiction. Individual criminal liability extends beyond those who carry out the acts to those who order, assist, facilitate, aid, and abet the offense. Under the principle of command responsibility, military, and civilian officials up to the top of the chain of command can be held criminally responsible for crimes committed by their subordinates when they knew or should have known that such crimes were being committed but failed to take reasonable measures to prevent the crimes or punish those responsible.

In December 2019, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda concluded a nearly five-year preliminary inquiry into the Palestine situation and determined that "all the statutory criteria" to proceed with a formal investigation of alleged serious crimes by Israelis and Palestinians had been met. The prosecutor found a "reasonable basis" to believe that war crimes had been committed by Israeli and Palestinian authorities but did not reference any crimes against humanity. Although the prosecutor did not require formal judicial authorization to move forward with a formal investigation, she nonetheless sought a ruling from the court's judges on the ICC's territorial jurisdiction before proceeding.

In February 2021, the court ruled that it had jurisdiction over crimes committed in the OPT, including East Jerusalem, confirming Palestine's status as a state party to the Rome Statute able to confer that jurisdiction.[75] This jurisdiction would include the ability to prosecute the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution. In March 2021, the Office of the Prosecutor announced the opening of a formal investigation into the situation in Palestine.

The Apartheid Convention also calls on states parties to prosecute those who commit the crime and over whom they have jurisdiction, as well as to take other measures aimed at "prevention, suppression and punishment" of the crime of apartheid.

Israeli government policy has long sought to engineer and maintain a Jewish majority in Israel and maximize Jewish Israeli control over land in Israel and the OPT. Laws, planning documents, and statements by officials demonstrate that the pursuit of domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians, in particular over demographics and land, guides government policy, and actions to this day.

This chapter will show that this objective amounts to an intent to maintain domination by one group over another. When inhumane acts are carried out in the context of systematic oppression pursuant to that intent to maintain domination, the crime against humanity of apartheid is committed.

Discriminatory intent, when it gives rise to severe abuses of fundamental rights, also makes up the crime against humanity of persecution.

To analyze the motivations behind Israeli policies towards Palestinians today, which developed over many years with much of the architecture established in the early years of the state and the occupation, this chapter considers materials that in some cases date back decades. This does not implicate every official cited in seeking to dominate Palestinians. In fact, some Israeli officials and parties advocated positions that, if implemented, could have avoided such policies.

Israeli authorities justify some of these policies in the name of security, but, as this chapter shows, they often use security as a justification to advance demographic objectives. In other cases, officials advocate for policies to safeguard Israel's identity as a Jewish state. Israel can, like any other state, seek to promote a particular identity, but that does not include a license to violate fundamental rights. Not all policies designed to promote Judaization constitute rights abuses. Particular policies can, though, provide evidence of a discriminatory intent or purpose to maintain domination by Jewish Israelis.

Even policies designed to fulfill legitimate security objectives must comply with international law. As this chapter will show, Israeli authorities have pursued many policies in ways that manifest a discriminatory intent to systematically dominate Palestinians. The legitimate objective of ensuring security does not negate an illegitimate intent to dominate or discriminate that is inherent in these policies.

Demographics

Statements by Israeli officials at the time make clear the discriminatory intent behind this move. Reporting on 2003 and 2004 statistics that showed a drop in the Israeli birthrate, primarily driven by a decline among Palestinian citizens of Israel, Haaretz in January 2005 attributed to the Finance Ministry the view that "the drop of birthrate is a clear result of the cutbacks in child support allocations over the past two years." Haaretz quotes a senior Finance Ministry official, who asked to be unnamed, citing the "internal demographic threat" and expressing concern over "the high birthrate of the Arabs, and especially the Negev Bedouin." The official said that "we are reversing the graph, to defend the Jewish majority in the country," and warned, according to Haaretz, that reinstating the allowance would lead to the state having to support large families in places like the Negev, which would have the effect of undermining the Jewish majority.

Control Over Land

Alongside demographic control, Israeli authorities have sought to ensure Jewish control over the land and natural resources in Israel and the OPT. Israeli authorities have largely pursued the goals of demographic and land domination in parallel, seeking to maximize the land available for Jewish communities and largely confine Palestinians to dense population centers.

When you enter the city through Lifta and Romema, through Mahaneh Yehuda, King George Street and Me'ah She'arim -there are no Arabs. One hundred percent Jews... What happened in Jerusalem and in Haifa-can happen in large parts of the country. If we persist it is quite possible that in the next six or eight months there will be considerable changes in the country, very considerable and to our advantage. There will certainly be considerable changes in the demographic composition of the country.

The explicit mandate of the JNF is to develop and lease land for Jews and not any other segment of the population. Under the terms of its Memorandum and Articles of Association, the JNF acquires property "for the purpose of settling Jews on such lands and properties." In a 2004 court filing, the JNF made clear that it "is not a public body that works for the benefit of all citizens of the state. The loyalty of JNF is given to the Jewish people and only to them is the JNF obligated." The JNF long interpreted its mandate as allowing it to block Palestinians from purchasing, renting, or building on their lands. Following a lawsuit brought by rights groups though, Israeli authorities have allowed non-Jews to use JNF land on condition that, if sold to them, the ILA will compensate JNF with land of equal value elsewhere. Haaretz, though, has reported that Palestinians have faced "red tape" far exceeding what Jews face when purchasing JNF land, delaying registration by years or more.

The WZO's Settlement Division, operating under the direct control of the Israeli government, established most settlements and manages the allocation of land for settlements with the stated purpose to "establish and strengthen Jewish settlement in the country's periphery through strengthening the hold on state lands given to it by the government." The government provides the division with its entire budget, which amounted to 441.6 million Israeli New Shekel (NIS) (US$132.60 million) between 2009-18. Since the early 2000s, the WZO has played a more active role as well in the Negev and the Galilee; the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has described them as "the government's executive arm for construction in the West Bank, as well as in the Negev and the Galilee."

Israeli authorities have pursued an explicit policy of ensuring Jewish control over geographic areas with strategic importance where there are concentrations of Palestinians across Israel and the OPT. Judaization of these areas contributed to facilitating Israeli government control over Palestinian population centers, dividing communities, and blocking the establishment of larger, contiguous Palestinian municipal areas in locations that Israeli authorities covet or consider particularly strategic. This strategy also contributes to generally diluting the Palestinian population in some areas and pushing them into crowded population centers.

Israel (Galilee and Negev)

In Israel, authorities maintain a policy to Judaize the Galilee and Negev regions, one pursued in coordination with the JNF, the Jewish Agency, and the WZO. These areas account for nearly two-thirds of the land in Israel, and encompass much of the Palestinian population. The Israeli government has a ministry focused on the "development" of the Galilee and the Negev, has invested significantly in these areas, and has considered it a major government priority for much of the past two decades. In 2004, the Sharon government unveiled a cross-sectional plan estimated to cost 16.8 NIS billion ($5 billion) that aimed to "increase the number of residents in the Negev to 1.5 million and in the Galilee to 1.1 million by 2010." Haaretz described efforts to develop these areas as possibly the "largest settlement effort inside the Green Line in the last 25 years."

The government's historic policies towards these areas provide further context for determining the intent behind its current policies. The plan to Judaize the Galilee, a region largely slated to fall within the "Arab State" in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, dates back to the 1950s when it emerged as part of a strategy to consolidate Israeli control of the area. A senior Israeli official at the time wrote that the Palestinian presence in these areas threatened Israeli control, worrying that Palestinians would "invade all areas we neglect, strike footholds and establish new roots."Ben Gurion told the Knesset that Israel's imposition of military rule over most Palestinians in Israel at the time aimed "to protect the right to Jewish settlement in all parts of the state." The plan to Judaize the Galilee focused initially on creating and sustaining Jewish communities such as Nazareth Illit (Hebrew for 'Upper Nazareth') in 1957, while limiting the growth of nearby Palestinian communities.

The strategy of maximizing Jewish settlement alongside suppression of the Palestinian population continues. In the Negev, for example, Sharon in December 2000, just before becoming prime minister and pursuing the development of the Negev as a principal goal, wrote:

In the Negev, we face a serious problem: About 900,000 dunams of government land are not in our hands, but in the hands of the Bedouin population. I, as a resident of the Negev, see this problem every day. It is, essentially, a demographic phenomenon... Out of weakness, perhaps also lack of awareness about the issue, we, as a country, are doing nothing to confront this situation... The Bedouin are grabbing new territory. They are gnawing away at the country's land reserves, and no one is doing anything significant about it.

Jerusalem

The Israeli government's formal policy for Jerusalem, including both west and the occupied east, is to pursue "maintaining a solid Jewish majority in the city," as stated in the government's plan for the municipality ("Jerusalem Outline Plan 2000"), and limiting the number of Palestinian residents. Concern with demographics in Jerusalem dates back to the early days of the state but accelerated with Israel's unilateral annexation of occupied East Jerusalem and parts of surrounding villages in 1967. Annexation expanded the boundaries of the city that Israeli authorities consider the country's capital, but also brought more Palestinians into an area that authorities treat as part of its sovereign territory. To mitigate the demographic effect of this move, authorities granted Palestinians from East Jerusalem permanent residency rather than an easy path to citizenship and instituted other policies aimed to foster and maintain a Jewish demographic majority in the city.

For Jewish Jerusalem, I did something in the past twenty-five years. For East Jerusalem? Nothing! What did I do? Nothing. Sidewalks? Nothing. Cultural institutions? Not one. Yes, we installed a sewerage system for them and improved the water supply. Do you know why? Do you think it was for their good, for their welfare? Forget it! There were some cases of cholera there, and the Jews were afraid that they would catch it, so we installed sewerage and a water system against cholera.

West Bank

The current map of the West Bank reflects decades of shifting Israeli governmental plans for the territory. Israel's earliest plans for the West Bank, including an unofficial plan initially drafted in July 1967 by then-Labor Minister Yigal Allon, envisioned Israeli control over the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank. In an essay he published in 1976 in Foreign Affairs explaining the plan, Allon insisted on the necessity of "absolute Israeli control over the strategic zone to the east of the dense Arab population, concentrated as it is on the crest of the hills and westward." The plan, retaining Israel's control over the Jordan Valley and of the corridor around Jerusalem, effectively divided Palestinians in the West Bank into three enclaves: one in the north from Jenin to Ramallah, one in the south including Hebron and Bethlehem, and one in the east around Jericho.

The "Master Plan for the Development of Settlements in Judea and Samaria 1979-1983," a 1980 plan formulated by the World Zionist Organization's Settlement Division, the body charged with establishing settlements and fully funded by the government and operating directly under its control, built on the prior schemes. The "Drobles Plan" as it was known, named after its author and head of the Settlement Division, Matityahu Drobles, called for Israeli authorities "to settle the land between the [Arab] minority population centers and their surroundings," noting that doing so would make it "hard for Palestinians to create territorial contiguity and political unity." The plan further noted that any autonomy granted to Palestinians, as set out in the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel of the late 1970s, did "not apply to the territories but rather to the Arab population alone" and that "there cannot be any shadow of a doubt about our intention to maintain perpetual control over the territory of Judea and Samaria." It adds that "the best and most effective way to remove any trace of doubt about our intention to control Judea and Samaria forever is through accelerated surge of settlements in these areas," in particular to "create the widest possible spread" of settlements and "establish additional settlements next to every existing settlement."

In 2014, Member of Knesset (MK) Yariv Levin, appointed the following year as Israel's minister of aliyah (Jewish Immigration) and integration, said, "The correct policy, from the point of view of Israeli interests regarding our political ability at the moment, is to combine the attempt to hold the maximum amount of territory and apply sovereignty over the maximum amount of territory while keeping the Arab population within it to a minimum. The situation already exists in Area C, which is under our control - there are little more than fifty thousand Arabs." In February 2021, Avi Naim, who served as director-general for Israel's Ministry for Settlement Affairs between July and October 2020, underscored the government's objective to "prevent Palestinian territorial continuity" and "keep control of land reserves in Judea and Samaria".

Authorities, in fact, explicitly said that they wanted to redirect the resources that went into the settler community in Gaza to strengthening Jewish Israeli control over parts of Israel and the West Bank. The early 2000s push, for example, to Judaize the Galilee and the Negev came as Israeli authorities were putting in motion their plans to withdraw from Gaza. Haaretz quoted an advisor to Prime Minister Sharon at the time as saying that Sharon "reached the conclusion that following the enormous investment in settling the territories, it is now necessary to settle the Galilee and the Negev."

Following Hamas's wresting control of the Gaza Strip from the PA in 2007, the Israeli government, which had a practice of security cooperation with the PA but hostile relations with Hamas, announced restrictions on the movement of people and goods into and out of Gaza. It declared Gaza "hostile territory" and took a range of measures aimed at, among other things, weakening the economy. As a central part of their policy, Israeli authorities have enforced what they call "a policy of separation" between Gaza and the West Bank, which they say serves "both security and political goals." In March 2019, the Jerusalem Post reported that Netanyahu justified allowing funding from Qatar to enter Gaza to support Hamas authorities in order to maintain the divide between Fatah and Hamas and thereby the separation between the West Bank and Gaza.

These policies pressure Palestinians to leave the part of the OPT that authorities covet for Jewish settlement-the West Bank-for the Gaza Strip, and join the more than 2 million Palestinians who are effectively off the demographic balance sheet in the lands where Jews reside. Without Gaza, the demographic ratio of Jews to Palestinians between the river and the sea shifts from about 50-50 to a 59-41 Jewish majority.

Fragmentation

Conclusion

The definition of the crime of apartheid under both the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute requires, in addition to the intent to dominate, systematic oppression, along with the commission of inhumane acts.

As just outlined, the Israeli government pursues policies and practices in the OPT and Israel that demonstrate its intent to maintain domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians. However, the severity and means used vary according to location.

In the OPT, Israel methodically subjugates the more than 5 million Palestinians living there. This chapter will show that these abusive policies are of such intensity that they amount to "systematic oppression" for the purpose of the crime of apartheid.

Inside Israel's pre-1967 borders, Palestinians hold citizenship, the right to vote and free movement, and encounter less severe policies and practices, but still face institutional discrimination and other abuses.

By contrast to the differences in the treatment of Palestinians, Israeli authorities grant all Jewish Israelis the same rights and privileges regardless of which side of the Green Line they live on. The effect, to varying degrees, is to privilege them over Palestinians in most aspects of life, including with legal status, access to land and freedom to build, and allocation of resources and services.

Systematic Oppression in the OPT

West Bank

Legal Status

Israel ostensibly built the separation barrier for security purposes, starting in 2002 during the second Intifada. However, officials have acknowledged that it chose its path, 85 percent of which lies inside the West Bank and protrudes up to 22 kilometers beyond the Green Line, to accommodate the growth needs of settlements, and to maintain the fabric of life of Israeli settlers.

Israeli authorities also maintain parallel criminal justice systems for settlers and Palestinians in the West Bank, excluding East Jerusalem. Israeli authorities try Palestinians charged with crimes in military courts, where they face a conviction rate of nearly 100 percent. By contrast, authorities have passed regulations that extend Israeli criminal law on a personal basis to settlers, and grant Israeli courts jurisdiction over them, while authorities have followed a longstanding policy not to prosecute Jewish settlers in military courts. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) found in a 2014 report that "since the 1980s, all Israeli citizens brought to trial before the military courts were Arab citizens and residents of Israel."

Land and Housing

Resources and Services

Israeli authorities retain primary control over resources and infrastructure and systematically privilege Jewish Israeli settlers over Palestinians in the provision of roads, water, electricity, health care, and other services. Even where Palestinians maintain a degree of autonomy within their enclaves, they rely on infrastructure projects, including roads, electricity towers, and water and sewage pipes that require Israeli-issued permits or that cross through Israeli-controlled Area C.

Israeli authorities, for example, built in the 1980s a significant segment of Road 443 in the West Bank, in part on expropriated Palestinian land, to offer an alternative route for Israelis to commute between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. Some landowners challenged the confiscation, but the Supreme Court dismissed their petition, accepting the government's position that it built the road, which also historically connected Ramallah to villages to its west, partly to serve the local Palestinian population. In 2002, following attacks by Palestinians on Israeli vehicles during the second Intifada, Israeli authorities banned Palestinian vehicles from using the road for any purpose, with the then local Israeli army commander declaring, "I made Route 443 an Israelis-only road." In 2007 and 2008, they built "fabric of life" roads to make it easier for Palestinians to access Ramallah without using Road 443. After years of litigation by Israeli rights groups, the Israeli army in 2010 reopened the road to Palestinian traffic.

However, the army kept in place checkpoints at each of the junctions that provide access to Palestinian villages. They also maintained a checkpoint near Ofer prison, where soldiers turn back all Palestinians not holding permits heading eastbound, who are identifiable by West Bank license plates. This checkpoint prevents them from reaching an exit several hundred meters away that leads straight into Ramallah, a central hub for Palestinians in the West Bank. So while Palestinian drivers from the West Bank can formally use a large section of Road 443, the checkpoints, by blocking access to Ramallah, render the road useless for most Palestinians. Palestinians from the villages near Road 443 instead rely on the "fabric of life" roads on which it takes them much longer to reach Ramallah or any destination beyond the several other small villages located alongside the road.

These restrictions have made Palestinians dependent on purchasing water, in large part extracted from under their land, from Mekorot. A 2013 UN Fact-Finding report found that Mekorot supplies "almost half the water consumed by Palestinian communities" in the West Bank. Palestinians in many cases pay more for water than Israelis, at times deriving from mark-ups in the price of the water sold to them, and in particular more than settlers, for whom the WZO subsidizes purchases. In addition, many Palestinian communities in Area C are not connected to the water network, despite Mekorot pipes in some cases running nearby, and depend on water transported by tanker trucks, significantly increasing its price and leading some families to spend up to 40 percent of their income on water.

Case Study: Salfit Governorate
The following case study details how Israeli authorities use oppressive means for the purpose of establishing domination over the Palestinian governorate of Salfit in the West Bank, abusing the rights of its residents to benefit Jewish Israeli settlers living nearby.
Salfit is one of eleven Palestinian governorates in the West Bank. It has a population of 81,162 and encompasses a cluster of hilltops and valleys in the northwest West Bank. Salfit's fertile lands, location atop the West Bank basin with the greatest water reserves, high elevation, and proximity to Tel Aviv, a 30-minute drive away, has made the governorate a strategic target for settlement activity.Israeli authorities have seized significant parts of the land, building a cluster of settlements centered around the urban settlement of Ariel. The settlements form a 22-kilometer corridor that strikes a wedge in the center of the governorate, dividing Salfit's Palestinians into three disconnected pockets of villages, and separating the town of Salfit, the governorate's administrative and commercial center, from other villages to the north. Residents of these communities face regular land confiscations, restricted access to agricultural land, movement restrictions, settler violence, and sewage run-offs from the nearby settlements.

Northwest of the cluster of settlements around Ariel, the Palestinian village of Mas-ha has faced regular land confiscations since the 1970s. In 1978, the Israeli army seized land in Mas-ha for "military purposes." In subsequent years, they declared lands around Mas-ha "state land" and allocated it to establish the settlement of Elkana in large part on agricultural lands belonging to Mas-ha residents. In 2002, authorities expropriated more land to build the separation barrier, cutting residents from some of their land. In 2018, Human Rights Watch interviewed the Aamer family, Mas-ha residents who own about 400-500 dunams of land about two kilometers from their house, but now located beyond the barrier and inside Elkana. A family member said that authorities confiscated some of their land and that they now need permits to access the remainder of it. The permits only allow them to enter through a designated gate that only opens twice a day, for 15-30 minutes each time. Reaching their land via the gate involves a two hour and 20 kilometer detour.

Settlements wreak havoc on the daily life of residents in other ways. Two landowners from Bruqin, a village in an isolated pocket south of the cluster of settlements, told Human Rights Watch that soldiers have for the past 20 years blocked residents from accessing 100 dunams of land they own next to the settlement of Bruchin, southwest of Ariel.Settlers have also placed mobile caravans on the land. One of the landowners, 60-year-old farmer Jamal Salameh, said he has since 2017 regularly sought, in vain, the Civil Administration's assistance to access this plot of land, where he has a well and used to grow wheat and barley.

Across the governorate, raw sewage and untreated industrial chemical waste from settlements and industrial zones flows into residential areas and around water sources, two municipal officials and two residents told Human Rights Watch. In a 2009 report, B'Tselem documented how Ariel's wastewater had since the mid-1990s flowed south towards the city of Salfit where it merged with Salfit's sewage and flows westward into Bruqin and Kufr ad-Dik.The group documented how Ariel's wastewater plant ceased functioning altogether in 2008, after more than a decade of unheeded warnings by Israeli environmental authorities about the plant's condition. It has remained dysfunctional since; a 2016 Israeli government publication noted that its efficiency is "low" with "effluent channeled into irrigation and the Shilo river."Salfit has sought for more than two decades to build a wastewater treatment plant, even securing funding for the project, but Israeli authorities continually frustrated their efforts, once claiming the location would be too close to Ariel, and another time conditioning approval on agreeing to treat Ariel's wastewater, a condition Palestinians often refuse since it would imply effective recognition of settlements. In 2019, though, the Salfit municipality obtained approval to build a plant to treat its wastewater alone and began construction of the plant in November of that year.[358]

A report published by the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the Palestinian Hydrology Group in 2011 said that the Barkan Industrial Area settlement, near Ariel, "is notorious for flushing its leftover chemical waste onto Salfit villages."[359] The report further states that "this chemical waste is thought to include petrochemicals, metals and plastic" and notes that "heavy toxic metals are linked to an endless list of conditions, from diarrhoea to diabetes, hyperkeratosis, organ failure and cancer." During the rainy season, according to B'Tselem, the sewage flows from Ariel downstream into springs and valleys, overflowing Salfit's central pumping station. A Bruqin municipality employee, Murad Samara, told Human Rights Watch that in al-Matwi valley, between Salfit and Bruqin, sewage from Ariel and Salfit flows through a valley where at least 50 families live. People in the community worried that exposure to sewage and chemical waste was making people sick. May Barakat, a mother of four who lives in the valley, told Human Rights Watch that "the smell in the valley is deadly" and that her three-year-old daughter was diagnosed with leukemia two years ago. She said that she stopped allowing her children to play outside after one of them fell into the sewage several years prior.

Another cluster of settlements runs through northern Salfit and juts deep into the neighboring governorate of Qalqilya. The separation barrier entirely encircles the city of Qalqilya, home to more than 55,000 people, with only one access road in and out of the city, in order to, according to B'Tselem "create contiguity between Israel" and the settlements there.They found that the barrier separates Qalqilya from half of its agricultural lands, about 2,500 dunams.

East Jerusalem

Legal Status

In contrast, Jewish Israelis from Jerusalem, including settlers in East Jerusalem, are Israeli citizens and do not have to prove that they maintain connections to the city in order to safeguard their legal status. Israeli authorities have not revoked the legal status of a single Jewish Israeli for failing to prove a "center of life" in Jerusalem. Jewish Israelis living in all parts of Jerusalem also vote in both municipal and national elections.

Land and Housing

The Ateret Cohanim settler organization, for example, has filed dozens of eviction lawsuits against around 100 Palestinian families living in the Batn al-Hawa area of Silwan in East Jerusalem, claiming that their homes belonged to a Jewish property trust that had housed Yemeni Jews in the late 19 century. Ateret Cohanim aims to create a Jewish neighborhood in the heart of Silwan, putting 700 Palestinians at risk of eviction. Jerusalem magistrate courts ruled in favor of Ateret Cohanim in several of these suits in 2020, ordering the eviction of families who had lived there for decades. In June 2020, a Jerusalem court ruled in favor of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) in an eviction proceeding that the group filed against a family of 18 from a building in Silwan that the family has lived in since the 1950s. These decisions have been appealed, and the evictions have not yet been carried out, as of March 2021.

Resources and Services

Case Study: Kufr Aqab
The following case study details how Israeli authorities have discriminated against Palestinians living in Kufr Aqab on the outskirts of East Jerusalem mainly through building the separation barrier between it and the rest of the city in 2002 and then largely neglecting the needs of residents. The situation in Kufr Aqab differs from the more common policies and practices that institutionally discriminate against Palestinians of Jerusalem but represents a different method by which an oppressively discriminatory system results in rights abuses for Palestinians living in East Jerusalem.
Beyond physically separating Palestinians from one another, the building of the barrier coincided with the Israeli government's effective abandonment of governance and law enforcement over Kufr Aqab. Israeli authorities do not operate a police station in Kufr Aqab, and, as acknowledged in a 2008 State Comptroller report, maintain "no police operations to enforce or maintain order" there. Munir Zghayyar, chair of the Kufr Aqab Residents Committee, told Human Rights Watch that he is not aware of a single incident of Israeli police entering Kufr Aqab since 2001 and that, even when residents cross the checkpoint and go in-person to a police station, authorities often do not intervene.The army, charged since 2006 with responsibility for security in Kufr Aqab, at times enters Kufr Aqab to carry out security operations and arrests, even though it defines the area as falling within Israel's sovereign territory and thus not under military rule.

With the PA barred under the Oslo Accords from operating in Kufr Aqab, these policies create what OCHA has called "a security vacuum manifested in an increase in lawlessness, crime and drug trafficking,"and offer fertile ground for fugitives from the PA police. Three Kufr Aqab residents told Human Rights Watch that they regularly hear gunfire, so much so that one resident's family grew "afraid to go on the balcony."Another said, "I am always afraid-anything can happen and who am I supposed to turn to when it does?"In the absence of law enforcement, Zghayyar, the Residents Committee chair, said some of the larger families living there have taken it upon themselves to adjudicate disputes.

Israeli authorities have also since the building of the barrier effectively stopped regulating construction. Municipal authorities approved a plan for Kufr Aqab in 2005, but Ir Amim found that it was "no longer current" even then. Zghayyar and an official from the municipal council both told Human Rights Watch that authorities have not issued a building permit for the area since 2001. Moien Odeh, a lawyer who has brought cases on behalf of Kufr Aqab and a former resident, said that residents used to have to get a difficult-to-obtain permit to "build anything," but, following the outbreak of the second Intifada and the building of the barrier, authorities suggested off-hand to some contractors and residents that they did not need a permit and residents eventually stopped applying. Ir Amim quoted the director of the municipality's building inspection division in a June 2015 report as acknowledging that the municipality is not monitoring or enforcing construction there. Ir Amim also determined that the division had not entered Kufr Aqab in a decade.

Kufr Aqab has since the building of the barrier attracted Jerusalemites married to Palestinians from other parts of the West Bank, who under Israel's Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order)-2003 cannot obtain permanent status through marriage to a Jerusalem resident.Since Kufr Aqab falls within the Jerusalem municipality, Jerusalemites living there can claim that they live in the city and not lose their residency on that basis. Scores of Palestinians have since 1967 moved to other parts of the West Bank. At the same time, its location beyond the barrier and lack of law enforcement means that West Bank residents can live there without crossing an Israeli checkpoint.

Because of Israel's discriminatory system, Palestinian "mixed" couples from Jerusalem and the West Bank can with few exceptions live together legally on a long-term, secure basis only in neighborhoods like Kufr Aqab. By contrast, Jewish "mixed" couples, including Jerusalemites married to West Bank settlers, can freely live anywhere in Israel, East Jerusalem, and the West Bank settlements.

Poor infrastructure, in particular, a run-down water pipeline system, also causes residents to lose about one-fourth of the water supplied to it. While Mekorot, the national water company, supplies water to most neighborhoods in Jerusalem, including settlements, the Palestinian-run Jerusalem Water Undertaking, which operates in Ramallah and nearby areas, services Kufr Aqab, as it did before 1967, and struggles to meet the demands of residents.

Jerusalem's mayor, Moshe Lion, visited Kufr Aqab, reportedly for the first time, in February 2021 and said the municipality will "increase its activity and take confidence-building steps."

Gaza Strip

Given international consensus around and Israeli recognition of Gaza and the West Bank comprising a single territorial unit, the OPT, Human Rights Watch assesses dynamics in Gaza as part of the OPT, despite Israel's "separation policy." Viewed in that light, the severe repression of Palestinians in Gaza stands in marked contrast to the treatment of Israeli settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Israeli authorities deny Palestinians in the OPT, including in Gaza, basic rights and services that they provide Israeli settlers living in the same legal territory, including freedom of movement, the right to live with or visit loved ones living in that territory, and access to 24-hour electricity and clean water.

Legal Status

The shifts that took place between 2005 and 2007 altered the mechanisms but not the fact of Israeli control of the Gaza Strip, nor the systematic oppression of its population. The withdrawal of settlers and regular ground forces from Gaza shifted Israel's practice from one focused on raids and arrests as in the West Bank to one built on the periodic use of overwhelming military force, often with devastating consequences for the civilian population.

Israeli forces stationed on the Israeli side of the fences separating Gaza and Israel responded with excessive lethal force to weekly demonstrations for Palestinian rights on the Gaza side that took place for much of 2018 and 2019. Snipers killed, according to OCHA, 214 Palestinian demonstrators, many of them more than one hundred meters away, and injured by live fire more than 8,000 more, including 156 whose limbs had to be amputated. As a UN Commission of Inquiry put it, Israeli forces shot at "unarmed protesters, children and disabled persons, and at health workers and journalists performing their duties, knowing who they are." The commissioners concluded that while demonstrations were "at times violent," protesters did not pose an imminent threat to life in the case of 187 of the 189 killings that took place in 2018, and Israel used "neither necessary nor proportional" force. Snipers followed orders from senior officials that sanctioned using live ammunition on Palestinians who approached or attempted to cross or damage fences between Gaza and Israel regardless of whether they posed an imminent threat to life. These practices stem from a decades-long pattern that has changed little since the outbreak of the first Palestinian Intifada in 1987 of using excessive force to quell protests and disturbances, at great cost to civilians. Despite the frequency of such incidents over the years, Israeli authorities have failed to develop law enforcement tactics that comport with international human rights norms, which prohibit the use of lethal force except in situations when it is necessary to prevent an imminent threat of death or serious injury. Israeli authorities have often justified these tactics in the name of protecting Israeli communities on the other side of the Gaza fence from the possibility of harm, but without justifying the force used under the imminent-threat test.

Land and Housing

Citing concerns about weapons smuggling, Israeli authorities also restrict how much of the sea, including Gaza's territorial waters, residents can access. For years, they generally permitted Palestinians to venture up to six nautical miles off the coast, though subject to frequent fluctuations; for a short period in 2019, they extended the limit to 15 nautical miles, though at other times barred access entirely. Israel has not justified these fluctuations in the fishing zone on security grounds, but rather as punitive measures in response to rocket fire or the launching of incendiary balloons by armed Palestinian groups, acts with which fishermen had no involvement. Between 2010 and 2017, the Palestinian rights group Al-Mezan documented 976 incidents of live fire at sea, resulting in five deaths and 250 incidents in which Israeli authorities seized boats or other equipment, allegedly for traveling beyond the permissible fishing zone. B'Tselem in 2017 found that the number of registered fishermen in Gaza dropped from about 10,000 in 2000 to around 4,000 in 2017, half of whom are out of work and 95 percent of whom live below the poverty line, concluding that Israeli policies, including "harassment of fishermen," are "destroying Gaza's fishing sector."

Resources and Services

Discriminatory restrictions and burdens imposed by Israeli authorities restrict the entry and exit of goods in and out of Gaza and limit the access of Gazans to basic services, such as electricity and water.

Israeli policies also sharply limit access to basic services, such as electricity and water. Between 1967 and 2002, Gaza depended on electricity it received from the Israeli Electric Corporation (IEC). Although Gaza's power plant became operational in 2002, it has operated at only partial capacity, in part as a result of several Israeli aerial attacks, and Gaza remains "almost completely dependent," as the Israeli Supreme Court put it in 2008, on Israel for its supply of electricity, either directly or indirectly. The IEC, though, sells only a set quantity of electricity to Gaza, which is insufficient to meet the demand of the population, even if the power plant operated at full capacity, and periodically reduces supply. In 2017, for example, it cut by 30 percent the amount it supplied Gaza, following a request from the PA, which sought to pressure Hamas authorities to relinquish their control over Gaza. Israeli forces have bombed Gaza's sole power plant on multiple occasions, significantly reducing its capacity. Israel's restriction on the entry of goods, including spare parts and equipment deemed dual-use, has hampered efforts to repair the plant. In addition, authorities periodically restrict, sometimes punitively and other times over disputes in payments, the amount of industrial fuel it allows to be purchased for the plant, which the plant needs to operate. Israel has also restricted the entry of solar panels and batteries, hampering efforts to develop alternative energy sources that would give Gaza a degree of energy autonomy. Gaza has at times purchased a small quantity of electricity from Egypt, but an amount insufficient to meet the needs of its residents. In 2017 and 2018, Gaza averaged 6.2 hours per day of electricity; that figure increased to 12 in 2019, largely due to Israel permitting Qatar to purchase fuel for use in Gaza through Israeli vendors. Meanwhile, Israeli settlers in the OPT enjoy uninterrupted electricity, mostly from the same IEC. Regular power outages affect many aspects of everyday life in Gaza, from heating and cooling and sewage treatment to health care and business.

Case Studies: Gaza
The following individual case studies illustrate how Israeli authorities, through violations of basic rights, systematically oppress Palestinians in Gaza, a part of the OPT.

This is Gaza - you're inside a big prison, wondering what the world outside has

"Yazan": Yazan, 26, felt his dream had come true; the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom offered him admission for undergraduate studies. Yazan missed the start of the semester in October 2018, as he awaited a reply to his application for an Israeli-issued permit and a letter allowing him to travel via Jordan to the UK. He received the permit in December and, on December 18, 2018, arrived at the Erez Checkpoint to begin his journey. Upon his arrival, though, an Israeli soldier escorted him to a room for questioning. He told Human Rights Watch that soldiers asked him about the situation in Gaza, one of his neighbors and a payment his father made. After waiting three hours, a soldier returned and said, "You'll be able to travel and everything will go well. How about providing us with some simple things in exchange for money and travel?" Yazan took this statement to be a request to provide intelligence about people in his community, and he refused. The soldier turned him away, warning that "you are ruining your future," and urged him "to think about it." Yazan said he considered leaving via Rafah, the crossing with Egypt, but the Hamas-administered waiting list was long, he could not afford to pay the several thousand dollars to advance his place on the waitlist, and the opportunity passed. Israel's separation policy effectively makes it impossible for Yazan to pursue educational or professional opportunities in the West Bank, even though his mother is from Nablus. He ended up studying in Gaza and now does temporary contract jobs, but "still has the same dream to study abroad" and continues to pursue scholarships. He told Human Rights Watch, "I flew away with this dream, but suddenly fell down and found myself in the real world. I feel like a bird inside a cage-I can fly in the cage, but always remain inside it. This is Gaza-you're inside a big prison, wondering what the world outside has."

"Leen": Leen, a 23-year-old actress, received a permit to leave Gaza for a visa interview in Jerusalem in July 2016, but decided not to return and went to live with her uncle in Jenin. She told Human Rights Watch that her prior travels abroad made her feel that she "wouldn't be able to achieve anything in Gaza" and could not come to terms with remaining there. She began studying at university and acting, moved to Ramallah, and applied to change her address so she could legally remain in the West Bank. But she never heard back about her application. Israeli authorities have effectively frozen the population registry since 2000, blocking even address changes. Her permit expired, Leen's presence in the West Bank became illegal, and she said she began to fear getting stopped and removed back to Gaza. She said, "I dream of getting a Palestinian ID that would allow me to move freely and travel, then go back home to Gaza to see my family." She now finds herself stuck, unable to visit her family, but unwilling to give up her dream of pursuing a better life in the West Bank. She added, "Gaza is a small prison. Ramallah is a big one.... If I had the chance to go back in time, I would have remained in Gaza and just learned to cope with life there."

"Samia": Samia, a 27-year-old English teacher, traveled to Jordan in 2016 for her studies. She told Human Rights Watch that she soon decided to return to Gaza, but that her relatives whom she visited in the West Bank convinced her to stay with them. She said she applied to change her address to the West Bank through the Palestinian Civil Affairs Office, which forwards applications to Israeli authorities, but she received no response. Samia began working as an English teacher in Ramallah and got engaged, but felt constantly restricted, unable to move freely with friends and family. On July 3, 2019, she set off in a taxi to visit her relatives in Nablus. On the way, Israeli soldiers stopped her at a checkpoint they had set-up. Upon seeing her address listed as Gaza, they accused her of "staying here illegally" and took her into custody at a military facility, where she spent the night. Early the next morning, she said, officers cuffed her around her feet and hands, put her in a vehicle without windows and drove her to the Erez Checkpoint, where they removed her back to Gaza without her belongings or even her ID card. "It was a nightmare," Samia said. She had planned to get married in 2020 and had already rented a place and began furnishing it, then "everything was gone within seconds." She could not believe, she said, that she "was deported from the second part of my country," a place just an hour away. She applied for a permit to return to the West Bank, but the Palestinian Civil Affairs office in Gaza told her that Israelis had placed a 6-month security bloc on her, barring her from travel. She said her fiancé twice applied for permits to visit Gaza, but Israeli authorities denied him both times; once due to Jewish holidays and the other without reason. She "lost hope" and even "told [her] fiancé to break up with me, if we are not able to get together." He refused, she said, and they continue to look for a way to live together.

"Hadil": In 2011, Hadil, a 37-year-old who works as a social media coordinator in Gaza, fell in love with a man from Nablus whom she met at a conference in Amman. She began applying for permits to visit him, but Israeli authorities routinely denied them, 11 times in total, she told Human Rights Watch. In 2012, the man managed to enter Gaza through Egypt for a visit and the two got engaged. Shortly thereafter, following a July 2013 military coup, Egyptian authorities largely sealed their border with Gaza. Hadil applied in 2014 for a family reunification request to live with her fiancé in the West Bank, but that was rejected without a reason given. In late 2015, she managed to get a permit to attend a conference abroad. On her way back, during transit via the West Bank from Jordan, she contemplated staying. But she worried about getting caught and being sent "for life imprisonment in Gaza," a reference to her fear that she would not be able to secure another travel permit, so she returned to Gaza, and the couple broke up in May 2015. In 2019, though, she managed to obtain permits through work to travel to the West Bank and met and got engaged to a man from Ramallah. She regularly worries, she said, about facing the same fate with this engagement. She has spoken to lawyers to file a request to change her address, she said, but they have told her that the odds are quite low that Israel will allow her to establish legal residence in the West Bank, and that the process will take significant time. Her fiancé's family has encouraged her to stay without status in the West Bank, but she is unwilling to take that risk. The couple does not consider Gaza an option, she said, because they have already purchased a home in the West Bank and did not want to separate her fiancé from his family. With the path to living together in the OPT effectively closed, they are now, she said, focused on finding a way to live together abroad.

"Kiran": 33-year-old Kiran and her husband decided in 2016 to move from Gaza to the West Bank in search of a better life. Kiran told Human Rights Watch that her husband obtained a permit to travel as a businessperson and decided to remain in the West Bank. Without meeting the stringent criteria for which Israel permits Gazan residents to travel, Kiran obtained a falsified medical referral indicating that her then 3-year-old son needed to travel for urgent medical care, she told Human Rights Watch. Authorities granted him a permit and her a permit to accompany him, and they traveled in 2017 alongside her 8-month-old second son. They have remained in the West Bank without status since. Her husband requested to change his address to one in the West Bank in 2016, but, as of writing, had not received a reply. Kiran said her family of five, including a third child they had in the West Bank, lives in "constant fear" of getting caught and being sent back to Gaza, and stays home whenever "there is any tension." They "feel like strangers inside [their own] home," as if they "are illegally residing in another country." She said she has missed many family occasions in Gaza, including weddings for both of her brothers, and that her husband hasn't seen his five children from a prior marriage since he left Gaza. She said she has considered returning to Gaza, but she worries about how life in Gaza would affect her three young boys. She told Human Rights Watch that "my boys get so happy when they see planes in the sky...I can't imagine their reaction when they see the planes they love firing missiles and bombs. I don't want them to experience war and death."

Institutional Discrimination in Israel

Legal Status

Israel maintains a two-track citizenship structure that treats Palestinians unequally as compared to Jews. While both Jews and Palestinians living in Israel are citizens, Israel's citizenship process privileges Jews and sharply restricts which Palestinians, beyond most existing residents and their descendants, can become citizens.

Haaretz reported in 2017 that Israeli authorities had revoked the citizenship of "hundreds if not thousands" of Palestinian Bedouins in the Negev region in recent years over alleged "erroneous registration" by them or their families between 1948 and 1952. In an August 2020 Knesset hearing, government officials acknowledged investigating the circumstances around the granting of citizenship to about 2,600 people and said that they had concluded that about 500 of them had been granted citizenship by mistake, although they claimed to have reestablished the citizenship of 362 of them via an expedited process.

While the third path, birth, covers both Jews and Palestinians, the fourth, naturalization, applies only to non-Jews. The Citizenship Law permits the Interior Ministry to grant citizenship to those who meet a number of conditions, including several years of residency in Israel, intention to settle, knowledge of Hebrew, renunciation of foreign citizenship, and oath of loyalty.

Land and Housing

Israeli law permits towns with up to 400 households in the Negev and the Galilee regions, areas that comprise two-thirds of the land in Israel,[608] to maintain admissions committees that can reject applicants from living there for being "not suitable for the social life of the community" or for incompatibility with the "social-cultural fabric." This authority effectively permits the exclusion of Palestinians from small Jewish towns, which Adalah, a human rights group based in Haifa, estimated in 2014 make up 43 percent of all towns in Israel, albeit a far smaller percentage of the country's population. In a 2015 study, Yosef Jabareen, a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, found that there are more than 900 small Jewish towns, including kibbutzim, across Israel that can restrict who can live there and have no Palestinian citizens living in them.

Resources and Services

Localities which collect less revenue from local taxes rely more on funding from the central government. Here too, Israeli authorities allocate budgets in a discriminatory fashion. For example, of the 2.82 billion NIS ($804 million) of economic recovery funds handed out by the Israeli government to local authorities in April 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic, only 1.7 percent went to Palestinian municipalities, according to Adalah. In education, the Israeli government operates two separate school systems, one for Jewish children and one for Palestinian children in Israel. Discrimination colors every aspect of the two systems; often overcrowded and understaffed, poorly built or maintained, state schools for Palestinian children offer fewer facilities and educational opportunities than what are offered to Jewish Israeli children. The Haifa-based rights group Mossawa Center found based on government data that, in 2013, the annual expenditure per student in Palestinian localities was 734 NIS ($220), as compared to 3,344 NIS ($1,004) in poor Jewish localities and 5,934 NIS ($1,781) in wealthier Jewish ones. Citing government data for that same school year, Haaretz found that expenditures by the state for Jewish Israeli high school students were 35 to 68 percent higher than for Palestinian students at the same socioeconomic level.

While authorities in recent years have reduced budgeting inequities, significant gaps remain. In particular, a five-year, more than 10 billion NIS ($3 billion) "economic development plan for the Arab sector" approved in December 2015 has increased allocation to sectors like transportation. However, it did not address other areas of disparity, including welfare services and high school education. Palestinian localities have also received funding from "equalization grants" provided by the central government and from a governmental fund aimed at "closing the [economic] gaps" between differently situated localities, but, according to Sikkuy, not to levels proportional to the gaps that exist in comparison to Jewish localities.[627] The Mossawa Center found in a study of Israel's 2019 budget that funding allocated to Palestinian areas remains "meager," with significant needs in education and other areas still present, and that "systematic discrimination" remains endemic in government spending.

Case Study: Nazareth
The following case study details how Israeli authorities discriminate against the residents of the Palestinian city of Nazareth in Israel in ways that stifle the community's growth and undermine its well-being while promoting the development of a Jewish-majority city next to it.
Later in 1949, Abu Arab's family moved to a neighborhood in Nazareth that came to be known as Safafra because of the many displaced Safuriyya residents who ended up there. In January 2001, Haaretz estimated that internally displaced Palestinians and their descendants constitute about half of Nazareth's population. Most of Abu Arab's family who lived in Safuriyya, including several dozen aunts, uncles, and cousins, never returned to the country, and they and their descendants remain refugees today, largely barred from even visiting. Abu Arab said he sometimes visits Tzipori, which today restricts who can live or enter there, in part to take care of five cemeteries in the moshav where Safuriyya's ancestors, including two of his cousins, are buried. He said he used to be able to see the lands of Safuriyya from his home in Nazareth and longs to return.

Some of the factors that motivated Haddad to leave the city he loved with his young family bear some similarities to pressures that lead urban dwellers in other contexts to move out of cities, including high housing costs, congestion, and a shortage of green space. In the case of Nazareth, these pressures in part derive from discriminatory Israeli land and budgetary policies.

Conclusion

Grave abuses, or "inhuman[e] acts" as set out in the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute, amount to the crime against humanity of apartheid when carried out in the context of systematic oppression with an intent to maintain a system of domination. Severe abuses of fundamental rights make up the crime against humanity of persecution when carried out with discriminatory intent.

To maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians, Israeli authorities have carried out over many years a range of serious abuses.

In the OPT, many of these abuses amount to inhumane acts, one of the three elements of the crime of apartheid, including:

sweeping restrictions on movement;

the confiscation of hundreds of thousands of dunams of land in the West Bank from Palestinians, depriving them of their property, means of livelihood and way of life, and consequent hemming in of the densely populated enclaves where most live;

the imposition of harsh conditions, including near-categorical denial of building permits, in large parts of the West Bank that coerce thousands to abandon their homes in conditions that amount to forcible transfer;

the denial of residency rights to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and their relatives for being abroad when the occupation began in 1967, or for long periods during the first few decades of the occupation, or as a result of the effective freeze on family reunification over the past two decades; and

the suspension of basic civil rights, such as freedom of assembly and association, depriving millions of the opportunity to have a voice in the wide range of affairs that most affect their daily lives and futures.

Separately from the inhumane acts carried out in the OPT, the Israeli government has carried out abuses against Palestinians within Israel, including:

refusing to allow Palestinians access to the millions of dunams of land that were confiscated from them;

implementing policies that make it virtually impossible for tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Negev region to live lawfully in the communities they have lived in for decades;

not permitting the more than 700,000 Palestinians who fled or were expelled in 1948 and their descendants to return to Israel; and

restricting legal residency in ways that block many Palestinian spouses and families from living together in Israel.

Carried out pursuant to long-standing policies and practices of the Israeli government, these acts dispossess many Palestinians, bar some from entering their places of origin, block others from leaving it, forcibly separate families, and wreak havoc on the lives of many more.

Inhumane Acts in the OPT

Israeli authorities have carried out a range of inhumane acts in the OPT.

Movement Restrictions

For over two decades, Israeli authorities have imposed sweeping restrictions on the ability of the more than 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza to leave that territory and sharply restricted the movement of 2.7 million Palestinians in the West Bank, both within that territory and beyond.

Closure of Gaza

Permit Regime in the West Bank

Israeli authorities have also imposed onerous restrictions on freedom of movement in the West Bank that they justify based on "substantive security reasons" given that "Palestinian residents from the region carried out... hundreds of deadly terrorist attacks." Israeli policies, however, restrict the movement of all Palestinians, not just those whom authorities deem to present a security threat. The army requires Palestinian ID holders, with narrow exemptions, to apply to the Israeli army for time-limited permits to enter significant parts of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, the "seam zone" between the separation barrier and the Green Line which covers more than 184,000 dunams, and areas controlled by settlements and the army, while allowing Israelis and foreigners to move freely among these areas, as well as to Israel, without permits. To obtain permits, Palestinians "face an arbitrary, entirely non-transparent bureaucratic system," with "no way of assessing the chances that their applications will be approved or how soon," according to the Israeli rights group B'Tselem. "Many applications are denied without explanation, with no real avenue for appeal," and "permits already granted are easily revoked, also without explanation," B'Tselem adds. Those denied permits include many who have never been detained or convicted on security grounds. The uncertainty discourages many Palestinians from applying for permits at all.

Land Expropriation and Creation of Separate Enclaves (West Bank, East Jerusalem)

Even if ownership can be proved, Israeli authorities interpret Ottoman land law in such a way as to take land without paying compensation to the owners when it can claim that at least 50 percent of the parcel has not been cultivated within the prior three years. This interpretation facilitated the takeover of "absentee" property belonging to Palestinians who fled during or following the 1967 War, as well as from Palestinians who remained in the West Bank but lost access to their land. Beginning in 1979, following an Israeli Supreme Court ruling that restricted the army's authority to transfer to settlements lands confiscated on purported security grounds that it recognized as privately owned by Palestinians, the Israeli military Custodian of Government Property conducted a hasty and error-riddled land survey that aimed to identify uncultivated lands that Israeli authorities could claim as state land. Based on the survey, Israeli authorities declared as state land parcels that had been cultivated but not intensely, that consisted of rocky terrain where much of the land is not arable, and where Palestinian residents had staked claims to the land through the informal mechanisms used to establish ownership in the West Bank, but had not registered it in the official land registry.

In addition, settlers have established settlements without any formal process or authorization from the Israeli military authorities, largely on the private property of Palestinians. Rather than demolish the buildings that settlers constructed on stolen land without permits, however, the authorities have, with a few notable exceptions, facilitated the land takeover by providing infrastructure, water, electricity, and other services. One hundred and fifty of such so-called outposts have been established across the West Bank since 1991, according to B'Tselem and Kerem Navot. Peace Now has documented 60 outposts established since 2012 alone. Israeli authorities retroactively granted legal status to 15 outposts between 2012 and early 2019, and Netanyahu has indicated that he intends to annex and incorporate outposts into Israel.

Forcible Transfer and the Right to Residence (Area C of the West Bank and East Jerusalem)

These policies create a coercive environment that pressures Palestinians to leave East Jerusalem and Area C. By making it exceedingly difficult to remain, Israeli policies induce Palestinians in these communities to abandon their homes and livelihoods and relocate, usually to towns or cities under the administrative and civil control of the PA. Peace Now estimates that, although Palestinians constitute 90 percent of the population of the Jordan Valley, Israel effectively restricts them from building on about 94 percent of the territory. According to OCHA, between January 1, 2009, and December 31, 2020, Israel demolished 2,601 Palestinian structures in the Jordan Valley for lacking a permit, displacing 3,716 people and affecting 23,464 others. More than 250,000 Palestinians lived in the Jordan Valley before 1967. Between 50,000 and 200,000 of them fled to Jordan during the 1967 War. Today, the population stands between 60,000 and 80,000.

Denial of Residency and Nationality

Israeli authorities have denied millions of Palestinians the right to residency and nationality through its control over population registries, the granting of legal status and residency rights, and entry and exit to Israel and the OPT.

West Bank and Gaza

Israel's policies that deny Palestinians in the OPT the ability to live in or travel to the areas they are from deny them "the right to freedom of movement and residency," one of the inhumane acts set out in the Apartheid Convention.

East Jerusalem

Mass Suspension of Civil Rights (West Bank, Gaza)

Other Abuses in Israel

Separately from the inhumane acts committed in the OPT, the Israeli government has carried out other abuses against Palestinians within its pre-1967 borders.

Land Expropriation and Restrictions

Beginning in 1948 and in subsequent decades, Israeli authorities seized several million dunams of land from Palestinians inside Israel. Many of the most serious abuses described in this subsection, involving the massive confiscation of land from Palestinian citizens of Israel, occurred between 1948 and 1966. While the plight of Palestinians in Israel has generally improved since the lifting in 1966 of the martial law that Israeli authorities imposed on them for the first 17 years of the country's history, these violations are continuing insofar as many of the victims remain unable to recover what authorities seized from them, return to live in the villages they came from, or obtain compensation for the losses they experienced.

Coercive Practices in the Negev Region

Denial of Residency and Nationality

Effective Ban on Granting Status to Palestinian Spouses from the OPT

Palestinian Refugees

Conclusion

Israeli authorities have deprived millions of people of their basic rights by virtue of their identity as Palestinians. These longstanding policies and systematic practices box in, dispossess, forcibly separate, marginalize, and otherwise inflict suffering on Palestinians.

Collectively, these policies and practices in the OPT severely deprive Palestinians of fundamental human rights, including to residency, private property, and access to land, services, and resources, on a widespread and systematic basis. When committed with discriminatory intent, on the basis of the victims' identity as part of a group or collectivity, they amount to the crime against humanity of persecution under the Rome Statute and customary international law.

Separately from the inhumane acts carried out in the OPT, the Israeli government violates the rights of Palestinians inside Israel on account of their identity, including measures that have made it virtually impossible for tens of thousands of Palestinian Bedouins living in the Negev to live lawfully in the communities; the denial to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of the ability to access or use land confiscated from them historically; the effective bar on citizens and residents obtaining long-term legal status to and thereby living permanently together in Israel with spouses from the West Bank and Gaza,which deprives them of the ability to live together permanently in Israel; and the denial of residency rights to Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes in the events around the establishment of the state.

These abuses continue and there is no indication that authorities have investigated, much less held accountable, anyone involved in their commission.

These recommendations stem from Human Rights Watch's finding that Israeli authorities are committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

Human Rights Watch found that the Israeli government has pursued an intent to maintain the domination of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians throughout the territory it controls. In the OPT, including East Jerusalem, that intent has been coupled with systematic oppression of Palestinians and inhumane acts committed against them. When these three elements occur together, they amount to the crime of apartheid.

Israeli authorities are also committing the crime against humanity of persecution based on the discriminatory intent behind Israel's treatment of Palestinians and the grave abuses it has carried out in the OPT.

To the State of Israel

Dismantle all forms of systematic oppression and discrimination that privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians and otherwise systematically violate Palestinian rights in order to ensure the dominance of Jewish Israelis, and end the persecution of Palestinians, including by ending discriminatory policies and practices in such realms as citizenship and nationality processes, protection of civil rights, freedom of movement, allocation of land and resources, access to water, electricity, and other services, and granting of building permits.

Fully respect the human rights of Palestinians, including those in the OPT, as well as the protections owed to Palestinians in the OPT under international humanitarian law.

Cease construction and expansion of settlements, dismantle existing settlements, and bring Israeli citizens inhabiting settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, back within Israel's internationally-recognized borders.

End the generalized ban on travel to and from Gaza and permit the free movement of people to and from Gaza, and in particular between Gaza and the West Bank, and abroad, subject to, at most, individual screenings and physical searches for security purposes.

Permit Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to move freely into East Jerusalem, subject to, at most, individual screenings and physical searches for security purposes.

End discrimination in the application of planning, permit, and building laws and regulations that subject Palestinians to discriminatory permit refusals and demolition orders.

Provide equitable access to land, housing, and essential services for Palestinians.

Dismantle the segments of the Separation Barrier not built along the Green Line but, rather, inside the OPT.

Repeal discriminatory laws and legal provisions in favor of legislation that is rooted in the principle of equality and conforms to international human rights standards, including:

The Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order)-2003, which allows Israeli citizens and residents to obtain legal status for their non-Israeli spouses, but not if the spouses are Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, who are explicitly ineligible under this law with few exceptions;

Provisions in the 2011 Admission Commissions Law that effectively allow discrimination by residents of small towns inside Israel against prospective residents on the basis of their race, ethnicity, or national origin;

Provisions in the Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People that discriminate between Jews and non-Jews with regard to the right to self-determination and to housing.

Remove arbitrary restrictions on residency rights for Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip and their families, including by stopping the practice of revoking the residency of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, ending the effective freeze on family reunification applications in the West Bank and Gaza since 2000, and allowing Palestinians to resettle in other parts of the OPT and register their new addresses.

Recognize and honor the right of Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes in 1948 and their descendants to enter Israel and reside in the areas where they or their families once lived, as Human Rights Watch has outlined in a separate policy, which also outlines the options of integration in place or in the OPT and resettlement elsewhere.

Cooperate with and heed the recommendations of UN bodies and human rights mechanisms.

Ratify the Rome Statute and incorporate crimes against humanity, including the crimes of persecution and apartheid, into national criminal law with a view to investigate and prosecute individuals credibly implicated in these crimes.

To the Palestinian Liberation Organization

Adopt an advocacy strategy centered on the immediate attainment of the full human rights of Palestinians, rather than one that puts off attainment of human rights in favor of a particular political outcome.

To the Palestinian Authority

Cease all security coordination with the Israeli army that contributes to facilitating the crimes of apartheid and persecution in the OPT.

Incorporate crimes against humanity, including the crimes of persecution and apartheid, into national criminal law.

To the International Criminal Court Office of the Prosecutor

Investigate and prosecute individuals credibly implicated in the crimes against humanity of apartheid or persecution.

To Members of the United Nations

Establish through the UN an international commission of inquiry to investigate systematic discrimination and repression based on group identity in the OPT and Israel. The inquiry should be mandated to establish and analyze the facts, and, where applicable, identify those responsible for serious crimes, including apartheid and persecution, with a view to ensure that the perpetrators of violations are held accountable, as well as collect and preserve evidence related to abuses for future use by credible judicial institutions. The inquiry's mandate should be sufficiently broad to cover the role of other actors, including companies and officials of other states.

Establish a UN Committee of representatives of member states to assess the findings of the international commission of inquiry, regularly review compliance with the commission of inquiry's recommendations, and recommend further action as needed.

Recommend, given the deadlock on this issue at the UN Security Council, that member states and blocs of states impose unilateral measures in the form of targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against officials and entities credibly implicated in the crimes of apartheid and persecution; unilaterally condition arms sales and security assistance to Israel on Israeli authorities taking concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution of Palestinians; and subject agreements, cooperation schemes, and all forms of trade and dealing with Israel to enhanced due diligence to screen for those directly contributing to the commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution of Palestinians, mitigate the human rights impacts and, where not possible, end those activities and funding found to contribute to facilitating these serious crimes.

Establish through the UN a position of UN global envoy for the crimes of persecution and apartheid with a mandate to advocate for their end and identify steps that states and judicial institutions should take to prosecute these crimes. Once established, request the UN Security Council to invite the envoy to participate in quarterly briefings on the situation in the Middle East.

To All States

Issue individual and collective public statements expressing concern about Israeli authorities' commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

Subject agreements, cooperation schemes, and all forms of trade and dealing with Israel to enhanced due diligence to screen for those directly contributing to the commission of crimes of apartheid and persecution of Palestinians, mitigate the human rights harms and, where not possible, end the activities and funding found to directly contribute to facilitating these serious crimes.

Impose targeted sanctions, including travel bans and asset freezes, against officials and entities responsible for the continued commission of grave international crimes, including apartheid and persecution.

Condition arms sales and military and security assistance to Israel on Israeli authorities taking concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

Incorporate the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution into national criminal law with a view to investigate and prosecute individuals credibly implicated in these crimes.

Investigate and prosecute those credibly implicated in the crimes of persecution and apartheid, under the principle of universal jurisdiction and in accordance with national laws.

Consider including calls for Israel to grant Palestinians in the occupied territory civil rights at least equal to those it grants its own citizens in publications, reports, and policy positions and to assess Israel's conduct on this basis, as Human Rights Watch has outlined in a separate publication.

To the President of the United States

Issue a public statement of concern regarding Israeli authorities' commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

To the United States Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Treasury

Condition military and security assistance to Israel on Israeli authorities taking concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

Conduct an assessment of and release a public report on the use of US-origin weapons and/or equipment, or Israeli weapons and/or equipment purchased with US funds, to contribute to the commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution, or to facilitate violations of international human rights or humanitarian law. If and when further assistance is provided, ensure that no funding goes to units where there is credible information implicating them in the commission of gross violations of human rights, in compliance with 620M of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, 22 U.S.C. 2378d and Section 362 of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, otherwise known as the Leahy Laws.

Impose visa bans and asset freezes pursuant to the Global Magnitsky Accountability Act of 2016, Executive Order 13818, and Section 7031(c) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act of 2019, on all Israeli officials found to be responsible for or complicit in gross human rights violations, including the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

To the United States Congress

Issue public statements of concern regarding Israeli authorities' commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

If the US executive branch fails to condition military and security assistance to Israel, Congress should legislate accordingly to condition military and security assistance to Israel on Israeli authorities taking concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

Request a report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) on how US support to Israel, including funds, weapons, and equipment, is used to contribute to the commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution; request that the GAO include in its report an investigation into the degree to which the US Departments of State and Defense are able to conduct appropriate human rights vetting of Israeli military units.

Ensure that all offices tasked with ensuring compliance under the Leahy Laws at the Departments of State and Defense have adequate funding and staff.

To the European Union and its Member States

Issue public statements of concern regarding Israeli authorities' commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

Conduct a holistic assessment of the implications for EU and member states relations with Israel arising from the findings of the crimes of apartheid and persecution, identifying in particular the legal consequences and obligations under EU and international law that apply to EU institutions, member states and EU-based private businesses, and the steps that should be taken accordingly, and make such assessment public.

Subject all EU and member states' bilateral agreements, cooperation schemes, and all forms of trade and dealing with Israel to enhanced due diligence to screen for those directly contributing to the commission of crimes of apartheid and persecution of Palestinians, mitigate the human rights harms and, where not possible, end the activities and funding found to directly contribute to facilitating these serious crimes.

Impose targeted sanctions against individuals and entities found to be responsible for the continued commission of grave international crimes, including apartheid and persecution.

Condition military and security assistance to Israel on Israeli authorities taking concrete and verifiable steps towards ending their commission of the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

Support the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry by the UN to investigate all forms of systematic discrimination or repression based on group identity in Israel or the OPT.

Support the establishment of a UN envoy on the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

To the European Parliament

Urge for the European Commission, the European External Action Service and EU member states to take the steps outlined above and request the EU High Representative and the Commission to keep the Parliament informed about next steps.

To businesses active in Israel and the OPT

Cease business activities that directly contribute to the crimes of apartheid and persecution.

Assess whether their goods and services contribute to the crimes of apartheid and persecution, such as equipment used in the unlawful demolition of Palestinian homes, and cease providing goods and services that will likely be used for such purposes, in accordance with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

Omar Shakir, Israel and Palestine Director at Human Rights Watch, was the lead researcher and author of this report. Other Human Rights Watch researchers contributed research and writing. Eric Goldstein, acting director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division, was the report's primary editor.

Tom Porteous, deputy program director at Human Rights Watch, and Clive Baldwin, senior legal advisor at Human Rights Watch, provided program and legal review. Kenneth Roth, executive director at Human Rights Watch, also reviewed the report. Philippe Bolopion, deputy director of global advocacy, Akshaya Kumar, director of crisis advocacy, and Bruno Stagno, chief advocacy officer, led the development of the recommendations in the report.

Balkees Jarrah, associate director of the International Justice Program, Bill Van Esveld, associate director in Human Rights Watch's Children's Rights Division, Elisa Epstein, Washington advocacy officer at Human Rights Watch, Felix Horne, senior researcher with Human Rights Watch's Environment and Human Rights Division, and Joseph Amon, consultant for Human Rights Watch, among others, also edited parts of the report.

Emilie Max, consultant for Human Rights Watch, contributed legal research. Sari Bashi, a consultant for Human Rights Watch, supported outreach and communications efforts. Diakonia, a Swedish development organization, provided a legal memorandum addressing legal issues related to the report. Aaqib Mahmood, former intern at Human Rights Watch, and Diana Naoum, former Middle East and North Africa coordinator for Human Rights Watch, also contributed research.

Associates in Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa Division and Travis Carr, photo and publications coordinator at Human Rights Watch, helped prepare the report for publication. Shirly Eran translated the report into Hebrew.

Ahmed Benchemsi contributed to the development of the accompanying multimedia piece, among others. The graphics for the report were developed in partnership with Visualizing Impact, whose effort was led by Jessica Anderson and Yosra El Gazzar.

We would also like to thank Nathan Thrall, Hagai El-Ad, Tareq Baconi, Michael Sfard, Moien Odeh, Dror Etkes, Murad Samara, Kathleen Peratis, Naji Naji, Tania Hary, Ahmed Elqattawi, and Ruhan Nagra, among others, for their insights and time.

Most importantly, we wish to thank the Palestinian, Israeli, and other human rights defenders and activists who for years have documented and courageously spoken out against the serious abuses documented in this report and the men and women who shared their stories with us.

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The 213-page report, "A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution," examines Israel's treatment of Palestinians. It presents the present-day reality of a single authority, the Israeli government, ruling primarily over the area between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea, populated by two groups of roughly equal size, and methodologically privileging Jewish Israelis while repressing Palestinians, most severely in the occupied territory.

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An updated version of this World Report chapter is available here >>
The Israeli government continued to enforce severe and discriminatory restrictions on Palestinians' human rights; restrict the movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip; and facilitate the transfer of Israeli citizens to settlements in the occupied West Bank, an illegal practice under international humanitarian law.

Israel's twelve-year closure of Gaza, exacerbated by Egyptian restrictions on its border with Gaza, limits access to educational, economic and other opportunities, medical care, clean water and electricity for the nearly 2 million Palestinians who live there. Eighty percent of Gaza's population depend on humanitarian aid.

Israeli forces stationed on the Israeli side of fences separating Gaza and Israel continued to fire live ammunition at demonstrators inside Gaza who posed no imminent threat to life, pursuant to open-fire orders from senior officials that contravene international human rights standards. According to the Palestinian rights group al-Mezan, Israeli forces killed 34 Palestinians and, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, injured 1,883 with live ammunition during these protests in 2019 as of October 31.

Fighting between Israel and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza involved unlawful attacks and civilian casualties. During a flare-up in early May, Israeli airstrikes killed 25 Palestinians, 13 of whom were civilians killed in strikes that appeared to contain no military objective or caused disproportionate civilian loss in violation of the laws of war, while Palestinian armed groups fired 690 unguided rockets towards Israeli population centers, war crimes, killing four Israeli and two Palestinian civilians.

During the first nine months of 2019, Israeli authorities approved plans for 5,995 housing units in West Bank settlements, excluding East Jerusalem, as compared to 5,618 in all of 2018, according to the Israeli group Peace Now. Israeli cabinet officials in September approved ex-post facto the outpost settlement of Mevo'ot Yericho in the Jordan Valley that had been illegal even under Israeli law, just days after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to annex the Jordan Valley if re-elected.

Meanwhile, Israeli authorities destroyed 504 Palestinian homes and other structures in 2019 as November 11, the majority for lacking construction permits. Israel makes it nearly impossible for Palestinians to obtain such permits in East Jerusalem or in the 60 percent of the West Bank under its exclusive control (Area C). The demolitions displaced 642 people as of September 16, more than the total number of people displaced in 2018 (472), according to the UN Office of the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). The Israeli rights group B'Tselem recorded more demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem in 2019 than in any other year since at least 2004.

Both the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and Hamas authorities in Gaza arrested opposition supporters and other critics and tortured some in their custody.

Gaza Strip

Closure

Israel imposes sweeping restrictions on the movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip. A general travel ban excludes only what Israel calls "exceptional humanitarian cases," meaning mostly medical patients and their companions, as well as prominent businesspersons who can obtain permits. In the first nine months of 2019, the army denied or failed to respond in a timely manner to 34 percent of permit applications from Palestinians with scheduled medical appointments outside Gaza, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The rejection or delay rate for applications for those injured in demonstrations along the fences separating Israel and Gaza is 82 percent.

During the first nine months of 2019, an average of about 462 Palestinians exited the Erez crossing into Israel each day, an increase from previous years, but a fraction of the daily average of more than 24,000 in September 2000, according to the Israeli rights group Gisha. Outgoing goods in the same period, mostly destined for the West Bank and Israel, averaged 252 truckloads per month, compared to the monthly average of 1,064 truckloads prior to the June 2007 tightening of the closure.

Families in Gaza on average received 12 hours of electricity a day in the first 10 months of 2019 according to OCHA, nearly doubling the 2018 average, thanks largely to additional fuel purchased by Qatar through Israeli vendors. The continuing shortfall, though, compromises Gaza's water supply and sewage treatment. As of mid-November, 46 percent of "essential" medicines were reported at zero stock at Gaza's Central Drug Store, according to WHO.

Between May and November 2019, Israel responded several times to the launching of rockets or incendiary balloons from Gaza into Israel by restricting access to Gaza's territorial waters for fishermen, closing Israeli crossings to Gaza, blocking the movement of people and goods, and slashing fuel imports to Gaza's power plant for days at a time. These measures amount to collective punishment in violation of international humanitarian law.

Israeli restrictions on the delivery of construction materials to Gaza, ostensibly to prevent their use for military purposes such as building tunnels, and a lack of funding have impeded reconstruction of homes damaged or destroyed during Israeli military operations. Over 12,000 Palestinians who lost their homes during the 2014 fighting between Israel and armed Palestinian groups remain displaced as of April, according to OCHA.

Egypt also restricts the movement of people and goods at its border with Gaza at Rafah. In the first eight months of 2019, an average of 12,026 Palestinians crossed monthly in both directions, a significant increase from previous years, but less than the average of 40,000 in the months before the military coup in Egypt in 2013.

Israeli Actions in Gaza

As of November 11, lethal force by Israeli forces resulted in the killing of 71 and injuring 11,453 Palestinians in Gaza, OCHA reported. An additional 33 were killed and 114 injured, according to al-Mezan, during escalated fighting between November 12 and 14. Many of the killings took place in the context of protests, when Israeli forces fired on people who approached or attempted to cross or damage fences between Gaza and Israel, using live ammunition in situations where lesser measures could have been used, in contravention of the international human rights law standard for policing situations that lethal force be used only as a last resort to prevent an imminent threat to life. The gunfire maimed many people, including 128 between the start of protests in March 2018 and September 2019 whose limbs had to be amputated.

Hamas and Palestinian Armed Groups' Actions in Gaza

Palestinian armed groups in Gaza fired 1,378 rockets towards Israel, as of November 19, according to the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center.

Attacks by armed groups in Gaza have killed four Israeli civilians and injured more than 123 Israelis. Rockets that fell short killed a pregnant Palestinian mother of nine and a toddler in Gaza.

Hamas authorities continue to provide no information about two Israeli civilians with psychosocial disabilities, Avera Mangistu and Hisham al-Sayed, whom they have apparently held for more than four years after they entered Gaza, in violation of international law.

Hamas authorities held 1,885 Palestinians in detention as of April 23, according to figures it provided Human Rights Watch. Between January 2018 and March 2019, it detained 4,235 people, including 66 for social media posts or for allegedly violating broadly worded offenses such as "harming revolutionary unity" and "misuse of technology" used to punish peaceful dissent or opposition. According to the Palestinian statutory watchdog Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR), Hamas authorities detained more than 1,000 Palestinians during March 2019 demonstrations against the high cost of living.

Hamas authorities also said they received 47 complaints of arbitrary arrest and torture during this period, none of which resulted in criminal convictions for the alleged wrongdoer. The ICHR received 138 complaints of arbitrary arrest and 155 complaints of torture and ill-treatment against Hamas security forces, as of September 30.

Hamas authorities have carried out 25 executions since they took control in Gaza in June 2007 following trials that lacked appropriate due-process protections. Courts in Gaza have sentenced 128 people to death since June 2007, according to the nongovernmental Palestinian Center for Human Rights. There were no executions in 2019.

Laws in Gaza punish "unnatural intercourse" of a sexual nature, understood to include same-sex relationships, with up to 10 years in prison.

West Bank

Israeli Actions in the West Bank

In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Israeli security forces killed 23 Palestinians and wounded at least 3,221, including those suspected of attacking Israelis, but also passersby and demonstrators, as of November 11. In many cases, video footage and witness accounts strongly suggest that Israeli forces used excessive force. As of November 11, attacks by Israeli settlers killed two Palestinians, injured 84, and damaged property in 234 incidents, according to OCHA.

Palestinians killed five Israelis and wounded at least 46 in the West Bank, as of September 17, according to OCHA.

Israelis largely failed to hold accountable security forces who used excessive force against Palestinians or settlers who attacked Palestinians and destroyed or damaged their homes and other property.

Settlements, Discriminatory Policies, Home Demolitions

Israel continued to provide security, infrastructure administrative services, housing, education, and medical care for more than 642,867 settlers residing in unlawful settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

The difficulty in obtaining Israeli-issued building permits in East Jerusalem and Area C has driven Palestinians to construct housing and business structures that are at constant risk of demolition or confiscation by Israel on the grounds of being unauthorized. The UN considers 46 Palestinian communities at "high risk of forcible transfer." International law prohibits an occupying power from destroying property unless "absolutely necessary" for "military operations." On July 22, Israeli authorities demolished nine "unlicensed" residential buildings and one other structure, containing about 70 apartments, in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sur Baher, on the stated grounds that they were too close to the separation barrier that Israel constructed, displacing 24 people. At time of writing, Israel had yet to demolish the Palestinian village of Khan al-Ahmar east of Jerusalem, despite a 2018 Supreme Court decision empowering it to do so.

Israeli authorities also continued their practice of demolishing the homes of families in retaliation for attacks on Israelis allegedly carried out by a family member, a violation of the international law prohibition on collective punishment.

Freedom of Movement

Israel maintained onerous restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in the West Bank. OCHA documented 705 permanent obstacles such as checkpoints across the West Bank in July. Israeli-imposed restrictions designed to keep Palestinians far from settlements forced them to take time-consuming detours and restricted their access to their own agricultural land.

The separation barrier, which Israel said it built for security reasons but 85 percent of which falls within the West Bank rather than along the Green Line separating Israeli from Palestinian territory, cuts off many Palestinians from their agricultural lands and isolates 11,000 Palestinians who live on the western side of the barrier but are not allowed to travel to Israel and must cross the barrier to access their own property and other services.

Arbitrary Detention and Detention of Children

As of October 31, according to Prison Services figures, Israeli authorities held 4,731 Palestinians in custody for "security" offenses, including 2,840 convicted prisoners, 1,061 pretrial detainees, and 460 in administrative detention based on secret evidence without charge or trial. Excluding Jerusalem residents, West Bank Palestinians were tried in military courts, including those charged with nonviolent speech or protest activity. Those courts have a near-100 percent conviction rate. Israel incarcerates many West Bank and Gaza Palestinian detainees and prisoners inside Israel, complicating family visits and violating the provisions of international humanitarian law that prohibit their transfer outside the occupied territory.

As of August 31, Israel was detaining 185 Palestinian children, many suspected of criminal offenses under military law, usually stone-throwing. Israel denied Palestinian children arrested and detained in the West Bank legal protections granted to Israeli children, including settlers, such as protections against nighttime arrests and interrogations without a guardian present. Israeli forces frequently used unnecessary force against children during arrest and physically abused them in custody.

Palestinian Authority's Actions in the West Bank

The PA held 1,134 people in detention as of April 21, according to figures it provided Human Rights Watch. Between January 2018 and March 2019, it detained 1,609 persons for insulting "higher authorities" and creating "sectarian strife," charges that in effect criminalize peaceful dissent, and 752 for social media posts. The PA also said it received 346 complaints of arbitrary arrest and mistreatment during this period, of which authorities found wrongdoing in 48 cases. Of these, 28 resulted in warnings or administrative sanctions and 20 were referred for prosecution, with only one conviction: an intelligence officer who received a 10-day sentence for assaulting demonstrators.

The ICHR received 213 complaints of arbitrary arrest, 140 complaints of people held without trial or charge pursuant to orders from a regional governor, and 138 complaints of torture and ill-treatment at the hands of PA security forces, as of September 30. In a meeting with Human Rights Watch in July, PA Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh vowed that "no citizen would be detained for exercising their freedom of expression."

In August, the PA police spokesperson announced a ban on activities by the Palestinian lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) group Al-Qaws for Sexual & Gender Diversity in Palestinian society and vowed to prosecute its members. Police subsequently told rights groups that they disavowed the statement but have yet to publicly repudiate it.

The personal status law continues to discriminate against women, including in relation to marriage, divorce, custody, and guardianship of children and inheritance. Palestine has no comprehensive domestic violence law to prevent abuse and protect survivors. In September, authorities charged three family relatives in connection with the killing of 21-year-old Beit Sahour resident- Israa Ghrayeb in August, an apparent act of domestic violence.

Israel

Israel held parliamentary elections in April and September 2019, but the Knesset dissolved itself shortly thereafter in both instances after parties failed to form a majority-led government. A third round of elections has been set for March 2020.

The Israeli Supreme Court is examining constitutional challenges to the Nation State Law adopted in 2018. The law, which has constitutional status, makes it a national priority to build homes for Jews but not others, and revokes the status of Arabic as an official language of Israel.

In November, Israel expelled a Human Rights Watch official, a decision that the Supreme Court upheld, on the asserted ground that the organization's call on businesses to stop operating in West Bank settlements constituted a boycott call and were thereby grounds for deportation under Israeli law. In October, Israeli authorities prevented a Palestinian staff member of Amnesty International from traveling out of the Occupied West Bank for undisclosed "security reasons." In August, Israeli authorities denied entry to US Congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib because of their support for boycotts of Israel.

The Israeli government continued the policy described by the Interior Minister at the time of making "miserable" the lives of the roughly 32,000 Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers present in the country who refused to depart. The government did so through restrictions on movement, work permits, and access to health care, and confiscation of a portion of their salaries.

Israeli law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. However, same-sex marriage is not legal. In July, 23 Israeli couples held a mass wedding to campaign for marriage equality in the country.

Key International Actors

In March, the US recognized Israel's annexation of the Golan Heights, denying the reality of Israeli occupation and protections due the Syrian population there under international humanitarian law. The US has maintained and expanded aid cuts to the West Bank and Gaza, including to USAID projects. In November, the State Department announced that it no longer considers Israeli settlements to violate international humanitarian law "per se", putting the United States outside the international consensus on the issue.

The European Union criticized the demolitions in Sur Baher in Jerusalem in July and Netanyahu's promise in September to annex the Jordan Valley.

In April, the global tourism company Airbnb reversed its November 2018 pledge to remove listings from Israeli settlements in the West Bank from its website, pursuant to a settlement reached to lawsuits in Israel challenging its decision and following actions by several US states to penalize it under anti-boycott laws.

In December, the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (ICC) concluded her preliminary examination into the Palestine situation with a determination that "all the statutory criteria" to proceed with a formal investigation have been met.. Instead of commencing the probe though, she requested a ruling from the court's judges on whether Palestine is a "state" for the purpose of conferring jurisdiction to the ICC over the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

In July, the UN secretary-general reported that Israeli forces had killed 56 Palestinian children and injured 2,733 in 2018, but as in previous years, did not include Israel in his annual "list of shame" for grave violations against children in armed conflict.

The Office of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights had yet to fulfill its mandate, at time of writing, to transmit to the UN Human Rights Council a database of businesses that have enabled or profited from settlements more than two-and-a-half years after its initial scheduled release.

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World Report 2020: Rights Trends in Israel and Palestine

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An updated version of this World Report chapter is available here >> The Israeli government continued to enforce severe and discriminatory restrictions on Palestinians' human rights; restrict the movement of people and goods into and out of the Gaza Strip; and facilitate the transfer of Israeli citizens to settlements in the occupied West Bank, an illegal practice under international humanitarian law.

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from Diana:

The perceived religious factor is not the main trait in this conflict. This is a purely political conflict rooted in Nationhood that uses religion as a defining category. This is a conflict between the occupier forces and the occupied population. In other words, it is a political conflict over control of the land and an example of settler colonialism and apartheid.

Since the occupation began in June 1967, Israel's policies of land confiscation, illegal settlement and dispossession, coupled with widespread discrimination, have inflicted immense suffering on the Palestinian population by stripping them of their fundamental rights.

Israel's military regime disrupts daily life in the Occupied Palestinian Territories in all its aspects. It continues to affect how and when Palestinians can - and if they can - travel to work or school, travel abroad, visit relatives, earn a living, attend a protest event, and access their farmland or even the supply of electricity or drinking water.  The rights of the Palestinian population living in the West Bank and Israeli territories are systemically violated. We are talking about a system of apartheid in which the Palestinian population is not only replaced and eliminated, erased from the territory, but in which the Palestinian population residing in Israel is not only replaced and eliminated, erased from the territory, but also faces restriction of mobility and difficulties to access basic services.

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From Souleymane:

The majority of the Guinean population is Muslim and violence between different groups is usually caused in political circles.

What is causing the violence between ethnic and religious groups is religious control by the state. This is leading to confrontation between groups that have historically gotten along well. 

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How do we deconstruct this discourse? In the context of our Sites of Conscience, how history and memory work are essential to building an inclusive society

In Guinea, to reduce the influence of religious discourse in the political arena, administrative reforms are needed to separate the state from religion. Religious freedom must be exercised without effective control by public authorities. It is simply a matter of regulation.
Guinea is a secular state as mentioned in the constitution, but in reality, religion influences politics and vice versa at all levels. There is even an association of marabouts recognized by the state.
Within the framework of the sites of conscience, the work of history and memory must allow us to learn from the experience of certain countries where religious discrimination, intolerance, extremism and terrorism reign.
History teaches us that human beings should not be persecuted or discriminated against on the basis of their ethnic identity, language or religion.
All human cultures must accept and respect each other for a just and peaceful world, otherwise external factors can lead to separations and break age-old ties between communities.

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How have Christian and Muslim religious leaders sometimes fueled violence between the different communities?

During the local elections of February 4, 2018, the imam of the main mosque of Kindia took a position against the election to the office of Mayor of the city of any citizen from another community other than the one to which he belongs.
This contributed to the violence between Fulani and Sousou under the indifferent eye of the political authorities and the direct complicity of some magistrates.
Although the election and the political agreement gave the Fulani candidate the potential winner, the local religious authorities used their influence to impose a different reality.
In 2009, after the massacres at the Conakry stadium on September 28, Bishop Vincent Koulibaly formally took a position in favor of Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, a Christian from the same region as himself.
For him, it was the organizers of the September 28, 2009 demonstration who were behind the violence committed at the Conakry stadium and not the military in the pay of the National Council for Democracy and Development. According to him, the objective was to tarnish the image of the country before the international community.

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In addition, religion is another cause of ethnic violence, as the influence of imams within communities is a means of propaganda and political mobilization.

The Republic of Guinea has a population whose religious beliefs are distributed as follows: 90% Muslims, 5% Christians and 5% animists.
The country has a Secretariat of Religious State attached to the Presidency of the Republic, which explains the control of political power over beliefs. The Imam of the Great Mosque of Conakry is appointed by presidential decree.

This situation creates a kind of dependence of the religious on the political and contributes to influencing the faith of citizens.
In some of the country's prefectures, imams have very strong powers before the political and judicial authorities. They are able to change the President's mind and even prevent the execution of certain judicial decisions. Their main weapons are sermons, public lectures and mystical powers.

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From Senateur: What are the main factors behind ethnic conflicts in Guinea?

The Republic of Guinea has some 15 ethnic groups divided into social groups that share the same history, language, religion or economic activity. It has social groups grouped around languages, the most widely spoken of which are Pular, Maninka, Soussou and forest languages.
During the colonial period, the country had kingdoms that coexisted peacefully and united against colonial penetration through resistance against occupation and domination.

At independence, political parties and cultural groups were created to awaken social consciousness against the excesses of the colonial power.
We can mention among others: the Democratic Party of Guinea, the African Bloc of Guinea, the African Party for Independence of socialist obedience, cultural groups such as the Amical Vieillard, the Manding Union, the Union of the Low Coast and the Forest Union.

All of these groups agreed on the idea of independence in order to get the country out of an occupation that had lasted nearly 60 years, despite some ethnic violence that had been recorded during the 1956 legislative elections between the Democratic Party of Guinea and the African Bloc of Guinea. These events were the starting point for the instrumentalization of ethnicities by political parties.

After the historic "no" vote in the referendum proposed by General De Gaule to the overseas territories, Guinea turned to the countries of the East following the rupture of diplomatic relations with France, which were not re-established until 1976.

Under the reign of President Ahmed Sékou Touré, Guinea lived in the theory of real or imaginary conspiracies that contributed to the development of mistrust between communities. We can mention the plot of the little Touré, the plot of the teachers, the plot of Kaman-Diaby, the aggression of November 22, 1970, the plot of the traders, the plot of the Peul...

Of all these plots, the one that had an impact on social and ethnic cohesion was the Fulani plot, which led the regime of President Ahmed Sékou Touré to call for the elimination of the Peul community. Children from this community were deprived of education through the confiscation of their scholarships and other violations.

After the death of President Sékou Touré, the coup d'état by Colonel Diarra Traoré aggravated tensions between communities. All army officers of Malinke ethnicity were arrested, tortured and executed without any form of trial by elements of the Military Committee for National Recovery.

When the Baule period arrived with the opening of democracy and multipartyism, political parties were formed, unfortunately, most of them were based on region and ethnicity. The results of all the elections organized in Guinea prove this because each candidate from a locality is supported not on the basis of a program but on the basis of common ethnicity.

This is why, in light of socio-political developments, it is safe to say that one of the major causes of ethnic conflict in Guinea is related to politics. The first communal elections in 1991 saw violence between the Malinke and Kpelle in the forest region, the consequences of which are still visible because at each election we see the demons of the past awaken.

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José Antequera, Director, Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación - Colombia

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José Antequera, Director, Centro de Memoria, Paz y Reconciliación - Colombia

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Lawyer from Universidad Externado de Colombia. Master in Political Studies from Pontificia Universidad Javeriana. Activist. Member of the founding team of the Center for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation. Former advisor to the National Center for Historical Memory. Author of several publications. Lecturer, columnist. Representative of the victims in Colombia at the negotiation table for the Peace Agreement between the State and the FARC guerrilla. Currently Director of the Center for Memory, Peace and Reconciliation.

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Emir Suljagic, Director, Srebrenica Genocide Memorial – Bosnia and Herzgovina

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Emir Suljagic, Director, Srebrenica Genocide Memorial – Bosnia and Herzgovina

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Emir Suljagić is a journalist, activist and the Director of the Srebrenica Genocide Memorial since 2019. Suljagić holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hamburg. His most recent research focuses on the role the Bosnian Serb Assembly played in the process of socially constructing Bosniaks as “Turks” within the context of the genocidal policies pursued by agencies, institutions and organs under the assembly. Suljagić worked as an English interpreter for the United Nations in Srebrenica and began his career as a journalist working for the award-winning weekly Dani (Days). He worked as a correspondent for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting reporting from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. Suljagić has published widely for The New York Times, the Boston Globe, AlJazeera, El Pais, Die Zeit, and Oslobođenje (Liberation) among others. Suljagić teaches International Relations at the International University of Sarajevo. His memoir Postcards from the Grave (2003) is the first account of a Srebrenica survivor to be published in English and was subsequently published in eight other languages.

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Diana Abouali, Director, Arab American National Museum – USA

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Diana Abouali, Director, Arab American National Museum – USA

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Diana Abouali is the director of the Arab American National Museum (AANM) in Dearborn, Michigan. Her career has straddled higher education, cultural heritage, and museum work. She has held a number of positions including assistant professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages and Literatures (now Middle Eastern Studies) at Dartmouth College; head of research and collections at the Palestinian Museum (Birzeit, Palestine), and director of education, outreach and awareness at the Petra National Trust (Amman, Jordan). She serves on several boards and committees including ArteEast (NYC), CultureSource (Detroit), the Citizens Advisory Committee at the University of Michigan- Dearborn, and the general assembly of Taawon-Welfare Association (Palestine). Diana graduated from Wellesley College and received a PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University.

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Souleymane Bah, President, OGDH - Guinea

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Souleymane Bah, President, OGDH - Guinea

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Geographer who started being interested in human rights in 1994. Trained at the  International Institute of Human Rights in Strasbourg and the Human Rights Council in Geneva. He held important  positions within the OGDH, the NGO he is currently leading.

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Mamadou Boussouriou Diallo (Senateur), President, COJEDEV- Guinea

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Mamadou Boussouriou Diallo (Senateur), President, COJEDEV- Guinea

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Mamadou Boussouriou Diallo, President of the Consortium of Youth Associations for the Defence of Victims of Violence in Guinea.  Married and the father of a 4 year old boy.

His commitment to human rights began in 2009 during the democratic transition that Guinea experienced after the death of President Lansana Conté. Alongside other young leaders of Guinean civil society, he became involved as soon as he graduated from a degree in computer engineering from the University of Conakry in 2005 to the promotion of democratic values, respect for human rights, education of young people in citizenship, non-violence and peace. He  worked as a programme officer for the joint FIDH-OGDH project for access to justice for the victims of the Conakry stadium massacres of 28 September 2009.

Long before, he participated in the documentation of human rights violations following the tragedy of 28 September 2009 alongside the Rencontre Africaine pour la Défense des Droits de l'Homme

of Human Rights-RADDHO as a monitor. In addition, his organisation COJEDEV has benefited for 7 years from the technical and financial support of the Global Human Rights Fund. They are members of the Guinean Coalition for the International Criminal Court where he holds the position of Secretary in charge of Communication. They provide protection to human rights activists and defenders who fight in the civic space,  the defence of public freedoms through a partnership with Freedom House.

In 2016, he benefited from a training with the International Centre for Transitional Justice before meeting the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience in September 2017 for the start of the violence prevention and community consultation project.

In 2018, he was elected Secretary General of the Coalition Nationale d'Appui à la Réconciliation en Guinée- CONAREG, which includes OGDH, AVIPA and other associations of victims of human rights violations. In September 2019, he benefited from a training course jointly organised by West African Civil Society Initiatives and the Global Human Rights Fund as part of the strengthening of strategies for collaboration between traditional grassroots organisations, social movements and Activists.