Hawzah News Agency – The United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories Michael Lynk has submitted a report to the UN Human Rights Council, concluding that the situation in occupied Palestine amounts to apartheid, Amnesty International reported in its website.

According to Amnesty, Lynk’s report analyzes the current human rights situation in occupied Palestine and finds that Israeli Jews and Palestinians live “under a single regime which differentiates its distribution of rights and benefits on the basis of national and ethnic identity, and which ensures the supremacy of one group over, and to the detriment of, the other.”

The report, Amnesty added, shows how Israel “endows one racial-national-ethnic group with substantial rights, benefits and privileges while intentionally subjecting another group to live behind walls, checkpoints and under a permanent military rule”, concluding that this “satisfies the prevailing evidentiary standard for the existence of apartheid,” and concludes that this “satisfies the prevailing evidentiary standard for the existence of apartheid”.

Commenting on the report, Saleh Higazi, Deputy Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International, said:

“The Special Rapporteur’s findings are an important and timely addition to the growing international consensus that Israeli authorities are committing apartheid against the Palestinian people. The report details how Israel has established a system of racially motivated oppression against Palestinians, explicitly designed to maintain Jewish Israeli domination, and maintained through the commission of grave human rights violations.”

The Canadian academic added that Israel’s failing strategy of censoring and discrediting anyone who uses the word apartheid “cannot hide the growing consensus among experts that the harsh reality of the grinding oppression to which Israel subjects Palestinians on a daily basis is a textbook example of apartheid.”

On February 1, Amnesty released its own report, which labels Israel an ‘apartheid state’. The report calls for Israel to be held accountable for its practices against Palestinians.

The 280-page document, entitled ‘Israel’s Apartheid Against Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity’, outlines how the Israeli state segregates and controls Palestinians in order to maintain Jewish hegemony.

Despite the increasing number of rights groups labelling Israeli policies as amounting to apartheid, the United States and Israel's other western allies have refrained from making any such declarations.