The Palestinian Authority on Tuesday night welcomed Amnesty International's report accusing Israel of subjecting Palestinians to a system of apartheid, and also urged the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council to impose sanctions on the Jewish state.
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The PA also called on the International Criminal Court at The Hague to launch an investigation into Israel's "crime against humanity of apartheid without delay."
The PA foreign ministry said in a statement that "Amnesty International joins a long list of distinguished Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations and experts in exposing Israel's colonial occupation for what it is: an institutionalized system of oppression and domination over the Palestinian people, designed to legitimize its colonial settlement expansion, deny the Palestinian people their inalienable right to self-determination, and erase Palestinian history, present, and future in their homeland," the statement read.
It described the report as "a detailed affirmation of the cruel reality of entrenched racism, exclusion, oppression, colonialism, apartheid, and attempted erasure that the Palestinian people have endured since the [1948] nakba [catastrophe]."
The Palestinians will continue to "exercise their legitimate right to oppose and resist all forms of occupation, colonization, dehumanization, racism, and apartheid until they achieve justice and realize their rights to self-determination, return, freedom, and independence," the statement said.
The London-based rights group said its findings were based on research and legal analysis in a 211-page report into Israeli seizure of Palestinian land and property, unlawful killings, forcible transfer of people and denial of citizenship.
"Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has pursued a policy of establishing and maintaining a Jewish demographic hegemony and maximizing its control over land to benefit Jewish Israelis while restricting the rights of Palestinians and preventing Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes," Amnesty said. "Israel extended this policy to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which it has occupied ever since."
Israel said the report, the second by an international rights group in less than a year to accuse it of pursuing a policy of apartheid, "consolidates and recycles lies" from hate groups and was designed to "pour fuel onto the fire of antisemitism".
"Its extremist language and distortion of historical context were designed to demonize Israel and pour fuel onto the fire of antisemitism," the Foreign Ministry said Monday.
In the wake of the report, the right-wing organization "B'tsalmo" called on Finance Minister Avigdor Lieberman to drop Amnesty International's tax-exemption status in Israel.
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According to the advocacy group, the goal of the tax exemption is to allow Israelis to donate to worthy public causes in lieu of their owed taxes.
"Does the finance minister believe that defaming and boycotting Israel is a worthy public cause that Israelis should fund?" the organization wrote in a public letter to Lieberman through its lawyer Michael Litvak.
Litvak further claimed that Amnesty has repeatedly called for boycotting Israel and even for an arms embargo on the Jewish state, as well as helping the UN in formulating blacklisted entities beyond the Green Line.
