Certainly.
I'll answer in English. Thank you for that question.
I just want to point out that often when we hear “apartheid”, I think people associate it immediately with South Africa, with the context of South Africa. It's important to note that apartheid looks different in different situations. In international law, what it actually means is a systematic, prolonged and cruel discriminatory treatment by one racial group of members over another, with the intention to control the other group.
What you're pointing out is indeed part of what we have observed over the past four years. My first call would be to encourage you and this committee perhaps to do what you did a few years ago, to go and visit. I will give some examples of the system that we've observed.
For instance, there have been severe movement restrictions in the West Bank. There is a network of checkpoints and road closures with permit systems which force Palestinians who want to visit other areas of the occupied Palestinian territories to seek the permission of the Israeli military. We've seen the denial of nationality to Palestinian citizens of Israel or the systematic denial of building permits to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, and the expansion of illegal settlements in East Jerusalem as well. This is why we extend our definition of apartheid beyond Israel and the OPT to displaced Palestinians. The denial of Palestinian refugees' internationally protected rights to return.... Israel bars Palestinian families who have been displaced for generations from returning to their former villages. We also see restrictions on access to land and fishing areas in the Gaza region, for instance.
There are statistics that speak to this in more detail. We look at all of these elements together rather than in a fragmented manner, including the crimes of forceable transfer, detention and torture, unlawful killings and injuries, and the denial of basic rights. When all of these crimes and systems are put together, the pattern of laws, policies and practices then amount to apartheid under international law, the definition that it has in the apartheid convention and the Rome Statute.
That has been our approach and our conclusion.