Press Releases

BADIL submits its report to the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of Palestine whether the Israeli conduct of its occupation of the Palestinian territory is in breach of the prohibition against apartheid in international law.

On 19 January 2022, BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights submitted its report to the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, Mr. Michael Lynk, on the question of whether the Israeli conduct of its occupation of the Palestinian territory is in breach of the prohibition against apartheid in international law.

In its submission, BADIL addressed Israeli apartheid as a system imposed on both sides of the Green Line as Israel does not only implement this unlawful system on one side of the Green Line. Israeli apartheid operates as an exhaustive system applied on all of Mandatory Palestine and against all Palestinians for the same purpose: acquiring the maximum amount of land with the minimum number of Palestinians, and therefore must be considered as such.

The report highlighted the entrenchment of the Israeli apartheid regime over the Palestinian people as a whole since 1948 through its laws, policies and practices. It specifically focused on how Israel utilizes transportation systems as one of its many apartheid tools whereby it has intentionally transforms transportation infrastructure into assets that create dual-spatial configurations through networks that run entirely along racial lines.

The submission concluded that the three apartheid tools of segregation, fragmentation, and isolation as well as their consequent restrictions that are imposed on Palestinians living across the Green Line amount to the level of deliberate measures calculated to prevent their participation in the political, social, economic, and cultural life and create conditions preventing their full development by denying them their basic human rights, which reveal that Israel is practicing apartheid over the Palestinian people.

Accordingly, BADIL called the UN and International Community to:

Strategically and systematically mobilize UN Human Rights bodies and mechanisms to recognize and to declare that Israel’s policies and practices create an institutionalized regime of racial domination and oppression over the Palestinian people as a whole, which amounts to the crime of apartheid under various international definitions of Apartheid.
Pressure third states to abstain from acknowledging and supporting situations of fragmentation, segregation, and isolation created by Israel which not only violate the Palestinian people’s internationally recognized right to self-determination, but also constitute one of the pillars of Israel’s apartheid regime over the whole of Mandatory Palestine.
Prompt the international community to take all measures available within international law, including sanctions, to hold Israel accountable for its policies and practices of apartheid and demand Israel to cease all measures and policies that contribute to the fragmentation of the Palestinian people and repeal all legislation enshrining racial discrimination, domination, and oppression.
Utilize all available legal mechanisms that obligate third states to cut all investment ties with companies listed on the UN database of business enterprises involved in activities relating to settlements in OPT and to refrain from supporting and/or investing in infrastructure and services, particularly transportation, that reinforce the apartheid situation of fragmentation, segregation and isolation of the Palestinian people from and within their territory.