Amnesty International describes Israel as an apartheid state in new report
Amnesty International, a widely respected human rights group, plans to release a report on Tuesday accusing Israel of committing apartheid and describing its existence as a Jewish state as a deprivation of Palestinians’ basic rights. Israeli officials on Sunday denounced the report as “antisemitism.”
In a 211-page report set for publication on Tuesday and obtained by the Forward, Amnesty alleges that Israel is involved in a “widespread attack directed” against Palestinians that amounts to “the crime against humanity of apartheid.”
Amnesty, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977, has previously condemned Israeli policies in the occupied West Bank and accused it of committing war crimes during the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. But this report is the first time the group is officially using the term “apartheid” to describe it.
The Amnesty report follows a similar report from Human Rights Watch last April; that report came after two leading Israeli human-rights groups began using the term apartheid. [Continue reading…]