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"The international community, speaking through the United Nations, has identified three regimes as inimical to human rights - colonialism, apartheid and foreign occupation," [UN's Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories] Dugard says. In his 24-page report, which will be presented to the United Nations General Assembly for debate on 15 March 2006, the South African lawyer accuses Israel of all three.
A few highlights:
- "it is left to Palestinians to find out by trial and error whether they will be allowed to pass through a checkpoint on a particular day [...] an arbitrary and capricious regime prevails."
- "The 75 km Wall being built in East Jerusalem is an instrument of social engineering designed to achieve the Judaization of Jerusalem by reducing the number of Palestinians in the city. The Wall is being built through Palestinian neighbourhoods, separating Palestinians from Palestinians, in a manner that cannot conceivably be justified on security grounds."
- [The fact that Israel has appropriated Palestinian agricultural land and water resources for its own use] "appears to be a form of colonialism of the kind declared to be a denial of fundamental human rights and contrary to the Charter of the United Nations as recalled in the General Assembly's Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples of 1960 (Resolution 1514 XV)."
- "Persons responsible for committing war crimes by the firing of shells and rockets into civilian areas without any apparent military advantage should be apprehended or prosecuted. This applies to Palestinians who fire Qassam rockets into Israel; and more so to members of the IDF who have committed such crimes on a much greater scale. While individual criminal accountability is important, the responsibility of the State of Israel for the violation of peremptory norms of international law in its actions against the Palestinian people should not be overlooked."
- "Undoubtedly the most aggravated settler behaviour occurs in Hebron [...] where Palestinian schoolchildren are assaulted and humiliated on their way to schools, shopkeepers are beaten and residents live in fear of settler terror [...] there is still evidence that the IDF turns a blind eye to settler violence and, on occasion, collaborates with the settlers in harassing and humiliating Palestinians."
