Israel accused of practicing 'apartheid' in occupied regions by human rights group

A leading Israeli human rights group named B’Tselem has described Israel and its control of the Palestinian territories as a single "apartheid" regime. On Tuesday, January 12, the group released a report which said that Palestinians live under different forms of Israeli control in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem and within Israel itself and have fewer rights than Jews in the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

According to AP reports, B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad said, "One of the key points in our analysis is that this is a single geopolitical area ruled by one government. This is not democracy plus occupation. This is apartheid between the river and the sea."

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Palestinians make about 20 percent of Israel’s population of 9.2 million and Israel says that they enjoy equal rights. However, B’Tselem argues that Israel has roughly 7 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians living under a single system with unequal rights. El-Ad said, "We are not saying that the degree of discrimination that a Palestinian has to endure is the same if one is a citizen of the state of Israel or if one is besieged in Gaza." He further claimed that there is not a single square inch between the river and the sea in which Palestinians and Jews are treated as equals. 

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Discriminatory practice  

Earlier, the Palestinian authorities accused Israel of discriminating over the COVID-19 vaccine rollout. The authority said that it expects the first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines in March under an agreement signed with the British-Swedish multinational pharmaceutical company, AstraZeneca but accused Israel of shrinking a duty to ensure that the jabs are available in the occupied territory amid the pandemic. Even though Israel has reportedly already become the world leader in COVID-19 immunisations per capita, the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip have reportedly not yet received the first jabs.

According to The Guardian, Israel transports batches of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine deep inside the West Bank, but they are not being distributed to the roughly 2.7 million Palestinians living in the region. The Palestinian Authority, which maintains limited self-rule in the territories, has said that optimistically, the shots could arrive within the next two weeks.

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(Image Credits: AP)