DAYS OF PALESTINE – The head of the UN warned Tuesday that “time is running short” concerning the situation in Palestine.

“We cannot lose sight of the long-sought goal of ending the occupation and realizing a two-state solution,” Antonio Guterres said at a meeting of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.

Guterres said the situation in Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, continues to pose a “significant challenge” to international peace.

“The promise of the independence of the Palestinian state remains unfulfilled. Political, economic and security conditions across the Occupied Palestinian Territory are deteriorating as Palestinians experience high levels of dispossession, violence and insecurity,” said Guterres.

He urged all parties to focus on efforts to end the occupation in line with UN resolutions, international law and agreements.

HRW’s report recognises that while the term “apartheid” is historically associated with segregationist policies in South Africa from 1948 until the 1990s, HRW refers to Israel’s policies constituting “apartheid” from an international law perspective.

In 2020, an Israeli human rights organisation, Yesh Din, concluded in a legal opinion that Israel was an “apartheid state,” where the “perpetrators are Israelis, and the victims are Palestinians”.

Amnesty last week became the latest human rights organisation to level that, concluding that Israel operated a “system which amounts to apartheid under international law”. It said that the UN security council must “impose targeted sanctions against Israeli officials implicated”, and demanded an arms embargo on Israel.