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Dr. Gabor Maté on Israel/Palestine - October 28, 2023

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A threshold crossed in apartheid [Human Rights Watch 2021]

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A threshold crossed in apartheid [Human Rights Watch 2021]

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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.

In the OPT, movement restrictions, land expropriation, forcible transfer, denial of residency and nationality, and the mass suspension of civil rights constitute “inhuman[e] acts” set out under the Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute. Under both legal standards, inhumane acts when carried out amid systematic oppression and with the intent to maintain domination make up the crime against humanity of apartheid.

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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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[Palestine Academy course]: Take a free online course to understand what's happening in Palestine

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[Palestine Academy course]: Take a free online course to understand what's happening in Palestine

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Take a free online class to learn what is happening in Palestine and learn how to support the cause on social media.

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Israel, the only country in the world that systematically detains children [UNICEF 2013]

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Israel, the only country in the world that systematically detains children [UNICEF 2013]

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"Following an increasing number of allegations of ill-treatment of children in military detention, UNICEF has conducted a review of practices related to children who come into contact with the military detention system, from apprehension, to court proceedings and outcome. [...] It is understood that in no other country are children systematically tried by juvenile military courts that, by definition, fall short of providing the necessary guarantees to ensure respect for their rights. All children prosecuted for offences they allegedly committed should be treated in accordance with international juvenile justice standards, which provide them with special protection."

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Israel's apartheid against Palestinians: A look into decades of oppression and domination [Amnesty 2022]

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Israel's apartheid against Palestinians: A look into decades of oppression and domination [Amnesty 2022]

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This page includes a report, a short course to help you understand the system of apartheid in Palestine and a video.

Amnesty International has demonstrated that Israel has imposed a system of oppression and domination over Palestinians wherever it exercises control over the enjoyment of their rights – across Israel and the OPT (Occupied Palestinian Territories) and with regard to Palestinian refugees. The segregation is conducted in a systematic and highly institutionalized manner through laws, policies and practices, all intended to prevent Palestinians from claiming and enjoying equal rights to Jewish Israelis within Israel and the OPT, and thus intended to oppress and dominate the Palestinian people. This oppression and domination have been cemented by a legal regime that controls (by negating) the rights of Palestinian refugees residing outside Israel and the OPT to return to their homes.

The organization has concluded that Israel has perpetrated the international wrong of apartheid, as a human rights violation and a violation of public international law wherever it imposes this system. It has assessed that almost all of Israel’s civilian administration and military authorities, as well as governmental and quasigovernmental institutions, are involved in the enforcement of the system of apartheid against Palestinians.

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In May 2021, Palestinian families in Sheikh Jarrah, a neighbourhood in occupied East Jerusalem, began protesting against Israel's plan to forcibly evict them from their homes to make way for Jewish settlers. Many of the families are refugees, who settled in Sheikh Jarrah after being forcibly displaced around the time of Israel's establishment as a state in 1948. Since Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967, Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah have been continuously targeted by Israeli authorities, who use discriminatory laws to systematically dispossess Palestinians of their land and homes for the benefit of Jewish Israelis.

In response to the demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah, thousands of Palestinians across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) held their own protests in support of the families, and against their shared experience of fragmentation, dispossession, and segregation. These were met with excessive and deadly force by Israeli authorities with thousands injured, arrested and detained.

The events of May 2021 were emblematic of the oppression which Palestinians have faced every day, for decades. The discrimination, the dispossession, the repression of dissent, the killings and injuries - all are part of a system which is designed to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.

This is apartheid.

Amnesty International's new investigation shows that Israel imposes a system of oppression and domination against Palestinians across all areas under its control: in Israel and the OPT, and against Palestinian refugees, in order to benefit Jewish Israelis. This amounts to apartheid as prohibited in international law.

Laws, policies and practices which are intended to maintain a cruel system of control over Palestinians, have left them fragmented geographically and politically, frequently impoverished, and in a constant state of fear and insecurity.

WHAT IS APARTHEID?

Apartheid is a violation of public international law, a grave violation of internationally protected human rights, and a crime against humanity under international criminal law.

The term "apartheid" was originally used to refer to a political system in South Africa which explicitly enforced racial segregation, and the domination and oppression of one racial group by another. It has since been adopted by the international community to condemn and criminalize such systems and practices wherever they occur in the world.

The crime against humanity of apartheid under the Apartheid Convention, the Rome Statute and customary international law is committed when any inhuman or inhumane act (essentially a serious human rights violation) is perpetrated in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with the intention to maintain that system.

Apartheid can best be understood as a system of prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment by one racial group of members of another with the intention to control the second racial group.

Amnesty International has created a free 90-minute course called "Deconstructing Israel's Apartheid Against Palestinians". To learn more about the crime of apartheid in international law, what apartheid looks like in Israel/OPT, and how it affects Palestinians' lives, sign up to our course on Amnesty International's human rights education academy.

WHY IS AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL CAMPAIGNING AGAINST APARTHEID?

I do not know why the entire world is watching what is happening and letting Israel get away with it? It is time the world stopped spoiling Israel
Nabil el-Kurd, one of the residents under threat of forced eviction in the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah

Apartheid is not acceptable anywhere in the world. So why has the world accepted it against Palestinians?

Human rights have long been side-lined by the international community when dealing with the decades-long struggle and suffering of Palestinians. Palestinians facing the brutality of Israel's repression have been calling for an understanding of Israel's rule as apartheid for over two decades. Over time, a broader international recognition of Israel's treatment of Palestinians as apartheid has begun to take shape.

Yet, governments with the responsibility and power to do something have refused to take any meaningful action to hold Israel accountable. Instead, they have been hiding behind a moribund peace process at the expense of human rights and accountability. Unfortunately, the situation today is one of no progress towards a just solution and worsening human rights for Palestinians.

Amnesty is calling for Israel to end the international wrong, and crime, of apartheid, by dismantling measures of fragmentation, segregation, discrimination, and deprivation, currently in place against the Palestinian population.

The Palestinian experience of being denied a home is at the heart of Israel's apartheid system. That's why, as a first step towards dismantling this system, we are calling on Israel to end the practice of home demolitions.

Palestinian families need people to stand with them against injustice and discrimination, by taking action to help them protect their homes.

Israel is not a state of all its citizens... [but rather] the nation-state of the Jewish people and only them
Israel's then prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu (message posted online in March 2019)

ISRAEL'S SYSTEM OF OPPRESSION AND DOMINATION OF PALESTINIANS

Since the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, successive governments have created and maintained a system of laws, policies, and practices designed to oppress and dominate Palestinians. This system plays out in different ways across the different areas where Israel exercises control over Palestinians' rights, but the intent is always the same: to privilege Jewish Israelis at the expense of Palestinians.

Israeli authorities have done this through four main strategies:

FRAGMENTATION INTO DOMAINS OF CONTROL

In the course of establishing Israel as a Jewish state in 1948, Israel expelled hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and destroyed hundreds of Palestinian villages, in what amounted to ethnic cleansing.

Since then, successive governments have designed laws and policies to ensure the continued fragmentation of the Palestinian population. Palestinians are confined to enclaves in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and the refugee communities, where they are subject to different legal and administrative regimes. This has had the effect of undermining family, social and political ties between Palestinian communities and suppressing sustained dissent against the apartheid system; it also helps to maximise Jewish Israeli control over land and maintain a Jewish demographic majority.

Millions of Palestinians remain displaced as refugees and continue to be physically isolated from those residing in Israel and the OPT through Israel's continuous denial of their right to return to their homes, towns and villages.

DISPOSSESSION OF LAND AND PROPERTY

Since 1948, Israel has enforced massive and cruel land seizures to dispossess Palestinians of their land and homes. Although Palestinians in Israel and the OPT are subjected to different legal and administrative regimes, Israel has used similar land expropriation measures across all areas - for example, since 1948, Israel has expropriated land in areas of strategic importance that include significant Palestinian populations such as the Galilee and the Negev/Naqab, and used similar measures in the OPT following Israel's military occupation in 1967. In order to maximize Jewish Israeli control over land and minimize the Palestinian presence, Palestinians have been confined to separate, densely populated enclaves. While Israeli policies have allowed for the discriminatory allocation of state land to be used almost exclusively to benefit Jewish Israelis both inside of Israel and in the OPT.

SEGREGATION AND CONTROL

Successive Israeli governments have pursued a strategy of establishing domination through discriminatory laws and policies which segregate Palestinians into enclaves, based on their legal status and residence.

Israel denies Palestinian citizens their rights to equal nationality and status, while Palestinians in the OPT face severe restrictions on freedom of movement. Israel also restricts Palestinians' rights to family unification in a profoundly discriminatory manner: for example, Palestinians from the OPT cannot gain residency or citizenship through marriage, which Jewish Israelis can.

Israel also places severe limitations on Palestinians' civil and political rights, to suppress dissent and maintain the system of oppression and domination. For example, millions of Palestinians in the West Bank remain subject to Israel's military rule and draconian military orders adopted since 1967.

DEPRIVATION OF ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL RIGHTS

These measures have left Palestinians marginalized, impoverished and economically disadvantaged across Israel and the OPT.

Decades of discriminatory allocation of resources by Israeli authorities, for the benefit of Jewish Israeli citizens in Israel and Israeli settlers in the OPT, compound these inequalities. For example, millions of Palestinians inside of Israel and East Jerusalem live in densely populated areas that are generally underdeveloped and lack adequate essential services such as garbage collection, electricity, public transportation and water and sanitation infrastructure.

Palestinians across all areas under Israel's control have fewer opportunities to earn a living and engage in business than Jewish Israelis. They experience discriminatory limitations on access to and use of farmland, water, gas and oil amongst other natural resources, as well as restrictions on the provision of health, education and basic services.

In addition, Israeli authorities have appropriated the vast majority of Palestinians' natural resources in the OPT for the economic benefit of Jewish citizens in Israel and in the illegal settlements.

LIFE UNDER APARTHEID

DENIED A HOME: DEMOLITIONS AND FORCED EVICTIONS

Palestinians are systematically subjected to home demolitions and forced evictions, and live in constant fear of losing their homes.

For more than 73 years, Israel has been forcibly displacing entire Palestinian communities. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians' homes have been demolished, causing terrible trauma & suffering. More than 6 million Palestinians remain refugees, the vast majority of whom live in refugee camps including outside of Israel/OPT. There are over 100,000 Palestinians in the OPT and another 68,000 inside of Israel at imminent risk of losing their homes, many for the second or third time.

Palestinians are caught in a Catch-22 situation. Israel requires them to obtain a permit to build or even erect a structure such as a tent, but - unlike Jewish Israeli applicants - rarely issues them a permit. Many Palestinians are forced to build without permits. Israel then demolishes Palestinian homes on the basis that they were built "illegally". Israel uses these discriminatory planning and zoning policies to create unbearable living conditions to force Palestinians to leave their homes to allow for the expansion of Jewish settlement.

Mohammed Al-Rajabi, a resident of Al-Bustan area in Silwan, whose home was demolished by Israeli authorities on 23 June 2020 on the basis that it was built "illegally", described to Amnesty International the devastating impact on his family:

This is extremely hard to deal with. It might be difficult to put into words... and I sensed that it was harder on my kids than on us. They were really excited for us to have this new home. I'm going to keep the photos from that day and show them to my children when they grow up, so they do not forget what happened to us. I will tell them, 'you see what kind of memories I have to pass on to you?' My plan was for them to have a warm family home close to their loved ones and family members. Now I'm passing on the memories of their first childhood home being destroyed
Mohammed Al-Rajabi, a resident of Al-Bustan area in Silwan

FRAGMENTED LOVE: SEPARATION OF PALESTINIAN FAMILIES

Israel has enacted discriminatory laws and policies that disrupt family life for Palestinians. Since 2002, Israel has adopted a policy of prohibiting Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza from gaining status in Israel or East Jerusalem through marriage, thus preventing family unification.

Israel has long used discriminatory laws and policies to separate Palestinians from their families. For example, Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza cannot gain legal status in Israel or occupied East Jerusalem through marriage, denying their rights to family unification. This policy has forced thousands of Palestinians to live apart from their loved ones; others are forced to go abroad, or live in constant fear of being arrested, expelled or deported.

These measures explicitly target Palestinians, and not Jewish Israelis, and are primarily guided by demographic considerations that aim to minimize Palestinian presence inside Israel/OPT.

Sumaia, was born and raised in Lod in central Israel. She married her husband, who is from the Gaza Strip, in 1998 and he moved to live with her in Lod. In 2000, Sumaia and her husband began the process of applying for family unification, so they could live together legally. The family unification process took 18 years, during which the couple lived in fear and anxiety. Sumaia told Amnesty International:

The government is controlling every detail of our lives, they are in our bedroom, in our homes. One of the most extreme cases was when they arrested my husband in 2004 while I was giving birth to one of my daughters...while I was in the delivery room they arrested him
Sumaia

UNDER SIEGE

Over the past 14 years, more than 2 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been living under Israel's illegal blockade. Along with four major military offensives, the blockade has had catastrophic consequences for the people of Gaza.

The blockade is a form of collective punishment. It forces Gaza's population - the majority of whom are refugees or their descendants who fled in 1948 - to live in increasingly dire conditions. There are severe shortages of housing, drinking water, electricity, essential medicines and medical care, food, educational equipment and building materials. In 2020, Gaza had the world's highest unemployment rate, and more than half of its population was living below the poverty line.

On 30 March 2018, Palestinians in Gaza launched the Great March of Return, a series of weekly mass demonstrations along the fence between Gaza and Israel.

They were demanding their right to return to their villages and towns in what is now Israel, as well as an end to Israel's blockade on Gaza. The response was brutal: by the end of 2019, Israeli forces had killed 214 civilians, including 46 children, and injured more than 8,000 others with live ammunition. A total of 156 of those injured had to have limbs amputated. More than 1,200 patients require long-term, complex and expensive therapy and rehabilitation, and tens of thousands more require psycho-social support -none of which are widely available in Gaza.

The blockade prevents Palestinians from accessing adequate healthcare, in particular life-saving and other emergency medical treatment only available outside Gaza. The Israeli authorities often delay these permits and sometimes fail to provide them at all.

Adham Al-Hajjar, 36, is a freelance journalist and lives in Gaza City. On 6 April 2018, while he was covering the Great March of Return demonstrations, Israeli snipers positioned along the fence separating Gaza from Israel shot him. He is unable to get the medical help he needs in Gaza because of the debilitated health services there.

The bullet that entered my leg did not just enter and leave my body. It entered and stopped everything; it stopped my life. Just because a soldier pulled the trigger without thinking of how it would devastate my life. Did he or she ever think about what this would cause? I am walking around as a dead man, everything in my life froze from the moment that bullet entered my leg
Adham Al-Hajjar

CRIMINAL PATTERNS

Israel has been systematically committing serious human rights violations against Palestinians for decades. Violations such as forcible transfer, administrative detention, torture, unlawful killings and serious injuries, and the denial of basic rights and freedoms have been well documented by Amnesty and others. It is clear that Israel's apartheid system is being maintained through committing these abuses-which have been perpetrated with almost total impunity.

They form part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian population, carried out within the context of Israel's institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination over Palestinians, and therefore constitute crimes against humanity of apartheid.

DISMANTLING THE SYSTEM

There is no place for apartheid in our world. It is a crime against humanity, and it has to end.

Israeli authorities have enjoyed impunity for too long. The international failure to hold Israel to account means Palestinians are still suffering every single day. It's time to speak up, to stand with Palestinians and tell Israel that we will not tolerate apartheid.

For decades, Palestinians have been calling for an end to the oppression they live under. All too often, they pay a terrible price for standing up for their rights, and they have long been calling for others around the world to help them.

Let this be the beginning of an end to Israel's system of apartheid against Palestinians.

Join us in the fight for justice, freedom, and equality for all.

The Palestinian experience of being denied a home is at the heart of Israel's apartheid system. That's why, as a first step towards dismantling this system, we are calling on Israel to end the practice of home demolitions.

Palestinian families need people to stand with them against injustice and discrimination, by taking action to help them protect their homes.

Further Reading

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Palestinians are systematically subjected to home demolitions and forced evictions, and live in constant fear of losing their homes. For more than 73 years, Israel has been forcibly displacing entire Palestinian communities. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians' homes have been demolished, causing terrible trauma & suffering.

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Evidence of Israel's unlawful use of phosphorus must be investigated as war crime [Amnesty 2023]

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Evidence of Israel's unlawful use of phosphorus must be investigated as war crime [Amnesty 2023]

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The Israeli army fired artillery shells containing white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon, in military operations along Lebanon’s southern border between 10 and 16 October 2023, Amnesty International said today. One attack on the town of Dhayra on 16 October must be investigated as a war crime because it was an indiscriminate attack that injured at least nine civilians and damaged civilian objects, and was therefore unlawful, said the organization.

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The Israeli army fired artillery shells containing white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon, in military operations along Lebanon's southern border between 10 and 16 October 2023, Amnesty International said today. One attack on the town of Dhayra on 16 October must be investigated as a war crime because it was an indiscriminate attack that injured at least nine civilians and damaged civilian objects, and was therefore unlawful, said the organization.

Cross-border hostilities in southern Lebanon have escalated significantly since 7 October. Israeli shelling in Lebanon has killed at least four civilians and 48 Hezbollah members so far. Hezbollah and other armed groups have also fired rockets at northern Israel, killing six Israeli soldiers and one Israeli civilian, according to the Israeli army. Amnesty International is investigating attacks by Hezbollah and other armed groups on northern Israel to determine whether they violated international humanitarian law.

"It is beyond horrific that the Israeli army has indiscriminately used white phosphorous in violation of international humanitarian law. The unlawful use of white phosphorus in Lebanon in the town of Dhayra on 16 October has seriously endangered the lives of civilians, many of whom were hospitalized and displaced, and whose homes and cars caught fire," said Aya Majzoub, Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International.

"With concern growing about an intensification of the hostilities in southern Lebanon, the Israeli army must immediately halt the use of white phosphorus, especially in populated areas, in line with its forgotten 2013 pledge to stop using these weapons. It must abide by its commitment and stop further endangering the lives of civilians in Lebanon."

The usage of white phosphorus is restricted under international humanitarian law. Although there can be lawful uses, it must never be fired at, or in close proximity to, a populated civilian area or civilian infrastructure, due to the high likelihood that the fires and smoke it causes spread. Such attacks, which fail to distinguish between civilians and civilian objects and fighters and military objectives, are indiscriminate and thus prohibited.

White phosphorus is an incendiary substance mostly used to create a dense smoke screen or mark targets. When exposed to air, it burns at extremely high temperatures and often starts fires in the areas in which it is deployed. People exposed to white phosphorus can suffer respiratory damage, organ failure and other horrific and life-changing injuries, including burns that are extremely difficult to treat and cannot be put out with water. Burns affecting only 10 percent of the body are often fatal.

It is beyond horrific that the Israeli army has indiscriminately used white phosphorous in violation of international humanitarian law.
Aya Majzoub, Amnesty International

The body of evidence reviewed by Amnesty International indicates that Israel has used white phosphorus smoke artillery shells during an attack on the southern border town of Dhayra, a populated civilian area. Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab verified videos and photos showing the use of white phosphorous smoke artillery shells in Dhayra on 16 October. Amnesty International researchers interviewed the Mayor of Dhayra, a resident of Dhayra, a first responder who facilitated the transfer of injured civilians to a nearby hospital and an emergency doctor working in the hospital which received the injured civilians.

The team also gathered compelling evidence indicating the use of white phosphorus in three other incidents between 10 and 16 October in Dhayra and the border towns al-Mari and Aita al-Chaab, by verifying videos and photos of these attacks.

Use of white phosphorus munitions in Dhayra

Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab verified a video showing artillery-dispersed smoke plumes, consistent with white phosphorus munitions, on 16 October in Dhayra.

Doctor Haitham Nisr, an emergency doctor at the Lebanese Italian hospital, told Amnesty International that on 16 and 17 October, medical teams treated nine people from the towns of Dhayra, Yarine and Marwahin who were suffering from shortness of breath and coughing, which he said was due to inhaling white phosphorus. Most patients were discharged from the hospital on the same day, he said.

The Regional Director of the Lebanese Civil Defence, Ali Safieddine, who facilitated the transfer of injured civilians to the hospital on 16 October and the subsequent evacuation of the town on 17 October, told Amnesty International that the Civil Defence received calls for help from residents who reported "bombs that are producing extremely bad odour and causing suffocation once inhaled... Four members of our staff as well as a number of people living in Dhayra were admitted to a hospital for suffocation in the past few days."

"We were not able to see even our own hands due to the heavy white smoke that covered the town all night long and lasted till this morning [17 October]," Ali Saffiedine told Amnesty International. This description is consistent with white phosphorus, which produces a dense white smoke and a garlic-like odour.

According to the Mayor of Dhayra, Abdullah al-Ghrayyeb, the shelling of the area, including with white phosphorus, started around 4:00pm local time on 16 October and continued into the night.

"A very bad odour and massive cloud covered the town so that we were not able to see beyond five or six metres in front of us. This caused people to frantically flee their homes. And when some returned two days later, their houses were still burning. Cars caught fire. Land areas were also burnt down. Until today, you find remnants - the size of a fist - that reignite when exposed to air," Abdullah al-Ghrayyeb told Amnesty International.

Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab analysed a video showing a crusted-over white phosphorus felt wedge reigniting in a resident's backyard when poked with a stone. According to al-Ghrayyeb, the resident took the video on 25 October, nine days after Dhayra was shelled with white phosphorus. White phosphorus can reignite when exposed to oxygen, even weeks after it is deployed.

Under international humanitarian law, all parties to a conflict must, at all times, distinguish between civilians and civilian objects, and fighters and military objectives and direct their attacks only at fighters and military objectives. Indiscriminate attacks - those that fail to differentiate between civilians and military objectives as required - are prohibited. Launching an indiscriminate attack resulting in loss of life or injuries to civilians or damage to civilian objects is a war crime.

White phosphorus should therefore never be used in areas populated by civilians, due to the high likelihood that the fires and smoke will spread, which would render such attacks indiscriminate. This attack on Dhayra, which injured civilians and damaged civilian objects, was indiscriminate and therefore unlawful. It must be investigated as a war crime.

Additionally, Amnesty International verified a video from Dhayra dated 13 October, showing artillery-dispersed smoke plumes, consistent with white phosphorus munitions. It also analysed footage filmed by a journalist on 10 October in Dhayra, seeming to show the release of white phosphorus igniting following contact with air.

Use of white phosphorus in Aita al-Chaab and al-Mari

Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab also verified footage showing the shelling of the border town of Aita al-Chaab and near the town of al-Mari in southern Lebanon.

Two videos verified by Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab filmed on 10 October around al-Mari show ignited felt wedges descending to the ground and instigating widespread fires, almost certainly indicating the use of white phosphorus.

Amnesty International also verified one video and five photos showing the shelling of Aita al-Chaab on 15 October, which very likely show the use of a mixture of white phosphorus rounds and standard high explosive artillery projectiles.

White phosphorus shells at the Israel -Lebanon border

Amnesty International's Crisis Evidence Lab verified photos taken by AFP photographers on 18 October near the Lebanese border. These photos show 155mm white phosphorus smoke ammunition shells lined up for use next to Israeli army M109 howitzers. These shells have a distinctive pale green colour and red and yellow colour bands, as well as visible markings reading M825A1 and D528, respectively the shell's nomenclature and the US Department of Defense Identification Code (DODIC) for white phosphorus-based ammunition, as already documented by Amnesty International near the Gaza fence. While these are US codes and nomenclatures, Amnesty International cannot confirm where these shells have been manufactured.

International law
White phosphorus is not considered a chemical weapon because it operates primarily by heat and flame rather than toxicity, making it an incendiary weapon. Its use is governed by Protocol III of the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW). Lebanon acceded to the protocol in 2017, but Israel has not.

Protocol III prohibits the use of airdropped incendiary weapons in "concentrations of civilians," and limits the lawful use of ground-launched incendiary weapons - such as the artillery documented here - where there are concentrations of civilians. The protocol defines incendiary weapons as ones "primarily designed" to set fires and burn people, excluding uses of incendiary weapons for other purposes, including as smokescreens.
Background
Cross-border hostilities have escalated since the attacks in southern Israel on 7 October, in which Hamas and other armed groups killed at least 1,400 people and took over 200 hostages, most of them civilians, according to Israeli authorities, Israeli forces have launched thousands of air and ground strikes on the Gaza Strip, killing more than 8,000 people, mostly civilians, including at least 2,704 children, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza. More than 17,439 have been injured and over 2,000 bodies are still trapped beneath the rubble while the health sector is on its knees.

In October, Amnesty International documented the use of white phosphorus artillery shells by the Israeli army in densely populated civilian areas in Gaza, some of which may be considered indiscriminate attacks and therefore unlawful. On 14 October, Israeli authorities denied that they used white phosphorus in their military operations in Gaza and Lebanon.

According to the International Organisation for Migration, as of 27 October, almost 20,000 residents in southern Lebanon have been displaced due to the hostilities. Israeli authorities also announced that they were evacuating 28 towns in northern Israel along the border with Lebanon, comprising around 60,000 residents.

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Evidence of Israel's unlawful use of white phosphorus in southern Lebanon as cross-border hostilities escalate

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The Israeli army fired artillery shells containing white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon, in military operations along Lebanon's southern border between 10 and 16 October 2023.

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How Israel controls and occupies Palestinian water[Amnesty 2017]

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How Israel controls and occupies Palestinian water[Amnesty 2017]

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The legacy of Israel’s 50-year occupation of the Palestinian territories has been systematic human rights violations on a mass scale. One of its most devastating consequences is the impact of Israel’s discriminatory policies on Palestinians’ access to adequate supplies of clean and safe water.

Soon after Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, in June 1967, the Israeli military authorities consolidated complete power over all water resources and water-related infrastructure in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). 50 years on, Israel continues to control and restrict Palestinian access to water in the OPT to a level which neither meets their needs nor constitutes a fair distribution of shared water resources.

Explore this Amnesty report from 2017.

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The legacy of Israel's 50-year occupation of the Palestinian territories has been systematic human rights violations on a mass scale. One of its most devastating consequences is the impact of Israel's discriminatory policies on Palestinians' access to adequate supplies of clean and safe water.

Soon after Israel occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip, in June 1967, the Israeli military authorities consolidated complete power over all water resources and water-related infrastructure in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). 50 years on, Israel continues to control and restrict Palestinian access to water in the OPT to a level which neither meets their needs nor constitutes a fair distribution of shared water resources.

In November 1967 the Israeli authorities issued Military Order 158, which stated that Palestinians could not construct any new water installation without first obtaining a permit from the Israeli army. Since then, the extraction of water from any new source or the development of any new water infrastructure would require permits from Israel, which are near impossible to obtain. Palestinians living under Israel's military occupation continue to suffer the devastating consequences of this order until today. They are unable to drill new water wells, install pumps or deepen existing wells, in addition to being denied access to the Jordan River and fresh water springs. Israel even controls the collection of rain water throughout most of the West Bank, and rainwater harvesting cisterns owned by Palestinian communities are often destroyed by the Israeli army. As a result, some 180 Palestinian communities in rural areas in the occupied West Bank have no access to running water, according to OCHA. Even in towns and villages which are connected to the water network, the taps often run dry.

While restricting Palestinian access to water, Israel has effectively developed its own water infrastructure and water network in the West Bank for the use of its own citizens in Israel and in the settlements - that are illegal under international law. The Israeli state-owned water company Mekorot has systematically sunk wells and tapped springs in the occupied West Bank to supply its population, including those living in illegal settlements with water for domestic, agricultural and industrial purposes. While Mekorot sells some water to Palestinian water utilities, the amount is determined by the Israeli authorities. As a result of continuous restrictions, many Palestinian communities in the West Bank have no choice but to purchase water brought in by trucks at a much high prices ranging from 4 to 10 USD per cubic metre. In some of the poorest communities, water expenses can, at times, make up half of a family's monthly income.

The Israeli authorities also restrict Palestinians' access to water by denying or restricting their access to large parts of the West Bank. Many parts of the West Bank have been declared "closed military areas", which Palestinians may not enter, because they are close to Israeli settlements, close to roads used by Israeli settlers, used for Israeli military training or protected nature reserves.

Israeli settlers living alongside Palestinians in the West Bank - in some cases just a few hundred meters away - face no such restrictions and water shortages, and can enjoy and capitalize on well-irrigated farmlands and swimming pools.

In Gaza, some 90-95 per cent of the water supply is contaminated and unfit for human consumption. Israel does not allow water to be transferred from the West Bank to Gaza, and Gaza's only fresh water resource, the Coastal Aquifer, is insufficient for the needs of the population and is being increasingly depleted by over-extraction and contaminated by sewage and seawater infiltration.

The resulting disparity in access to water between Israelis and Palestinians is truly staggering. Water consumption by Israelis is at least four times that of Palestinians living in the OPT. Palestinians consume on average 73 litres of water a day per person, which is well below the World Health Organization's (WHO) recommended daily minimum of 100 litres per capita. In many herding communities in the West Bank, the water consumption for thousands of Palestinians is as low as 20 litres per person a day, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). By contrast, an average Israeli consumes approximately 300 litres of water a day.

50 years on, it is time for the Israeli authorities to put an end to policies and practices which discriminate against Palestinians in the OPT and to address their desperate need for water security. The Israeli authorities must lift the restrictions currently in place which deny millions of Palestinians access to sufficient water to meet their personal and domestic needs as well as to enjoy their rights to water, food, health, work and an adequate standard of living.
Devastating toll on communities in the Jordan valley
In September 2017 Amnesty International researchers met with residents of the Jordan Valley and witnessed first-hand the catastrophic impact the water restrictions have had on people's daily lives.

Ihab Saleh, a squash and cucumber farmer living in Ein al-Beida, a Palestinian village of about 1,600 people located in the northern part of the West Bank, is one of hundreds of thousands of people whose lives and livelihoods have been destroyed by Israeli water restrictions. Over the past 25 years he has seen the local spring gradually dry up after the Israeli company Mekorot drilled two wells near the neighbouring Palestinian community of Bardala, to serve Mehola, an Israeli settlement. The amount of water the Israeli authorities allocate to the village has been decreasing over the years, he says, and has been fully cut off on numerous occasions. Despite an agreement to compensate the Palestinian villages of Bardala and Ein al-Beida, since the mid-1970s, Israel has significantly reduced the amount of water available to both communities.

In addition to the farming villages, many Bedouin communities in the Jordan Valley face severe restrictions as a consequence of Israel's control of Palestinian natural water resources. Often the land they live on is designated by Israel as a "closed military area". Not only is their access to water limited, they also live under the constant threat of forced evictions through demolition orders on their homes and properties.

Two families living beside highway 90 near the village of Ein Al-Beida have had their houses and property destroyed twice in the last two years. Most recently, in December 2016, the Israeli army destroyed two home structures and all of the water tanks belonging to the families.

In al-Auja, a village of about 5,200 people, 10 kilometres north of Jericho in the Jordan Valley, the situation is much the same. In 1972, Mekorot sunk a well and established a pumping station, close to the Wadi Auja spring. According to residents, the spring used to provide a plentiful supply of water to the village and surrounding agricultural land via a series of irrigation channels.

Even the Palestinian Authority does not realize that this used to be a centre for agriculture... People are left with no options. In 1967, when they [the Israeli authorities] started taking the water it was like a sickness in a body... slowly the land dried up.
Issa Nijoum speaking to Amnesty International, Al-Auja.

Due to water shortages, farmers in Al-Auja were forced to diversify from their traditional livelihoods, and now grow crops that are less water-intensive and also less profitable. While in the past they grew mainly citrus fruit and were capable of exporting them, they rely now on less water intensive vegetable crops such as zucchini, cucumber and squash, which can sustain a cultivation period of three to four months through the winter season. Many residents of Al-Auja have also been forced to find work in farms located in three neighbouring Israeli settlements, which have unrestricted access to water.

Israeli settlements' access to water

Qais Nasaran a store owner from Al-Jiftlik, a village with an estimated population of approximately 4,700, located in the northern Jordan Valley, used to farm a small plot of land. After his well dried up, he has been forced to find a new way to make a living. He now runs a grocery store.

The store is located in an old pump house for a well which was sunk in 1966 with permission from the Jordanian authorities who controlled the West Bank at the time. A year later, after Israel occupied the Palestinian territories, the Israeli authorities stopped Qais Nasaran's family from using it. There was water in the well until 2014 when it finally dried up. Qais explained how, each year, when the well was full, the Israeli military would check to see no one was using it.

Qais still owns a cistern on his land, but cannot always afford to fill it as it costs around 8,000 NIS (approximately 2,278 USD). He buys his water from a landowner in the Jordan Valley.

For Mustafa Al-Farawi, a date farmer from Al-Jiftlik, the situation is similar. The amount of water available from the well on his land has been decreasing steadily over the years.

He explains that, in the 1980's, the well would provide enough water to irrigate an area of 1,000 acres, and provide water for the animals, as well as supporting the family. Now the majority of water used for his date farm has to be bought and transported with a water tank from a spring 7km away, which is the only spring that can still be accessed by Palestinians.

We have not enough water and no control of it. The Israeli authorities' tactic is to slowly decrease the water so we have to leave the land.
Mustafa Al-Farawi, Al-Jiftlik

In recent years, Mustafa wanted to sink a new well at a different location that would guarantee more water. He says that an engineer came to check and there was water closer to ground level on another part of the farm's land. He applied for drilling rights but the Israeli authorities denied the application. Eventually he decided to sink the well anyway without permission, but the Israeli army came and prevented him from doing so. He was told that sinking the well was against Israeli military orders and the construction was halted.

The village of Furush Beit Dajan, in the northern West Bank with a population of about 930, used to be a producer of citrus fruit. From the mid 1990's, farmers have had to diversify their crops due to insufficient water supplies.

The villagers say that they used to have an abundance of water but in recent years the wells have been supplying less and less. Residents of the village mentioned that the aquifer is being exhausted by Israeli wells used to supply the neighbouring Israeli settlements of Hamra and Mehora. According to Azim Mifleh, a farmer from the village, Israeli wells started pumping in the vicinity of the village in the 1970's and slowly the local wells lost their efficiency. Since the Oslo Accords signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1995, Israel has extracted far in excess of the agreed quantity of water from the Eastern Aquifer.

Azim Mifleh, a farmer and coordinator for the Agricultural Development Association (PARC) from Furush Bei Dajan, says he used to have 800 trees on his land; mostly lemon and grapefruit. Now he only has two trees left next to the house.

The land is occupied and the [Israeli] occupiers should be looking after the people...Israel should be doing what they are supposed to; they have to pay the price for occupying, and act in the best interest of the occupied people.
Azim Mifleh, Furush Beit Dajan

There are five water wells in the vicinity of Furush Beit Dajan village- all are privately owned by Palestinians. According to residents from the village, they have suffered drastic decreases in their output of water due to Israeli wells being sunk in the area to supply the settlement of Hamra, which farms an extensive area of land. The settlement of Hamra has a 100 acre date farm and also harvests water-intensive crops such as bananas and citrus fruits.

The right to water

The human right to water is indispensable for leading a life in human dignity.
UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, General Comment No. 15, para 1

The right to water has been recognized as being derived from the right to an adequate standard of living, and therefore implicitly contained in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and other instruments. The right to water includes availability of sufficient water for personal and domestic uses, physical access within or in the immediate vicinity of each household, affordability, and adequate quality of water. States must prioritize, as part of their immediate obligations, access for everyone to the minimum essential amount of water that is sufficient and safe for personal and domestic uses to prevent disease. States have to adopt the necessary measures directed towards the full realization of the right to water, including by taking positive measures to assist individuals and communities to enjoy the right.

Under international law, Israel, as the occupying power in the OPT, has well defined responsibilities to respect the Palestinians' human right to water. It must not only refrain from taking actions that violate this right or undermine the Palestinian population's opportunity to realize the right, but also protect the Palestinian population from interference by third parties in their enjoyment of the right to water, and it must take deliberate, concrete and targeted steps to ensure that this right is fulfilled and fully realized.
Further Reading

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The legacy of Israel's 50-year occupation of the Palestinian territories has been systematic human rights violations on a mass scale. One of its consequences is the impact of Israel's discriminatory policies on Palestinians' access to clean and safe water.

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[MUST WATCH] "Gaza fights for freedom" documentary

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[MUST WATCH] "Gaza fights for freedom" documentary

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Journalist/filmmaker Abby Martin begins this searing documentary with a recap of the historical and political factors that have brought the Gaza Strip to utter devastation in its present state of siege, with a trapped population plagued by poverty, food shortages, and ongoing rocket bombardment. “It looks like we are alive, but we are not,” states an unemployed man who lives with his wife and sixteen children in two rooms with access to electricity only four hours a day. The centerpiece of this film is you-are-there coverage of the Great March of Return in May, 2018, when thousands of frustrated Gaza citizens march peacefully to the razor-wire barricades, only to be randomly picked off by Israeli snipers.

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Gaza Fights For Freedom (2019) | Full Documentary | Directed by Abby Martin

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Understanding war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity: The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC)

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Understanding war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity: The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC)

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The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court is the treaty that established the International Criminal Court. It was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Rome, Italy on 17 July 1998 and entered into force on 1 July 2002.

The Rome Statute established four core international crimes: (I) Genocide, (II) Crimes against humanity, (III) War crimes, and (IV) Crime of aggression. Following years of negotiation, aimed at establishing a permanent international tribunal to prosecute individuals accused of genocide and other serious international crimes, such as crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression, the United Nations General Assembly convened a five-week diplomatic conference in Rome in June 1998 "to finalize and adopt a convention on the establishment of an international criminal court".[10][11]

Read the Rome Statute to understand what constitutes these crimes and reflect upon Israel's actions.