AFP, Geneva

The United Nations yesterday said decades of discrimination and segregation of Palestinians by Israel in the West Bank were intensifying, and called on the country to end its “apartheid system”.

In a new report, the UN rights office said the “systematic discrimination” against Palestinians across the occupied Palestinian territories had “drastically deteriorated” in recent years.

“There is a systematic asphyxiation of the rights of Palestinians in the West Bank,” UN rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement.

“Whether accessing water, school, rushing to hospital, visiting family or friends, or harvesting olives –- every aspect of life for Palestinians in the West Bank is controlled and curtailed by Israel’s discriminatory laws, policies and practices,” he added.

“This is a particularly severe form of racial discrimination and segregation, that resembles the kind of apartheid system we have seen before.”

A number of independent experts affiliated with the UN have described the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories as an “apartheid” but this marks the first time a UN rights chief has applied the term.

Yesterday’s report said the Israeli authorities “treat Israeli settlers and Palestinians residing in the West Bank under two distinct bodies of law and policies, resulting in unequal treatment on a range of critical issues”.

“Palestinians continue to be subjected to large-scale confiscation of land and deprivation of access to resources,” it added.

This had led to “dispossessing them of their lands and homes, alongside other forms of systemic discrimination, including criminal prosecution in military courts during which their due process and fair trial rights are systematically violated”.

Turk demanded yesterday that Israel “repeal all laws, policies and practices that perpetuate systemic discrimination against Palestinians based on race, religion or ethnic origin”.

The discrimination was compounded by continuing and escalating settler violence, in many cases “with the acquiescence, support and participation of Israel’s security forces”, the rights office said.

More than 500,000 Israelis currently live in settlements in the West Bank, occupied since 1967 and home to around three million Palestinians.

Violence has risen in recent years, surging especially since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack, which triggered the Gaza war.

Since the start of the war, Israeli troops and settlers have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in the West Bank.