AL-QUDS (AP) – The Zionist regime on Monday called on Amnesty International not to publish an upcoming report accusing it of apartheid, claiming the conclusions of the London-based international human rights group are “false, biased and anti-Semitic.”
Amnesty is expected to join the New York-based Human Rights Watch and the Israeli rights group B’Tselem in accusing the Zionist regime of the international crime of apartheid based on its nearly 55-year military occupation of lands the Palestinians want for a future state and because of its treatment of the Arab minority.
The occupying regime dismissed the other reports as biased, but is adopting a much more adversarial stance this time around. Zionist foreign minister Yair Lapid has said the regime expects intensified efforts this year to brand it as an apartheid regime in international bodies and hopes to head them off.
In a statement issued Monday, he claimed Amnesty “is just another radical organization which echoes propaganda, without seriously checking the facts,” and that it “echoes the same lies shared by terrorist organizations.”
Amnesty did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Zionist regime is compared to South Africa, where an apartheid system based on white supremacy and racial segregation was in place from 1948 until the early 1990s.
Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem evaluate the occupying regime’s policies based on international conventions like the Rome Statute, which defines apartheid as “an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group.”
They say that the regime’s various policies in the territories under its control are aimed at preserving a Jewish majority in as much of the land as possible by systematically denying basic rights to Palestinians.
The International Criminal Court is already investigating potential war crimes committed by the regime in the occupied territories. After last year’s Gaza war, the UN Human Rights Council set up a permanent commission of inquiry to investigate abuses by the Zionist regime, including “systematic discrimination and repression based on national, ethnic, racial or religious identity.”