ISRAEL is an apartheid state, increasing its oppression of Palestinians in a system entrenched via military occupation and racist laws, Israeli human-rights group B’Tselem said today.

It published a new paper warning: “A regime of Jewish supremacy exists from the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea. This is apartheid.”

The report dismisses notions that Israel is a democracy —representing some six million people while simultaneously holding a further five million Palestinians under “temporary military occupation.”

B’Tselem insists there are not two parallel systems but a single one governing all the people that live under it.

It reports that the situation for Palestinians has worsened with the implementation in 2018 of Israel’s Nation State Basic Law, legislation that received global condemnation after affirming that “national rights in Israel belong only to the Jewish people.”

The law permits institutional discrimination in land management and development, housing, citizenship, language and culture, B’Tselem says, and has legalised the second-class status of Palestinians.

The report explains that Israeli illegal settlement structures have expanded to construct a Jewish-only state without building a single community for Palestinians, instead destroying their homes.

Since the 1948 establishment of the state of Israel, Tel Aviv has taken over 90 per cent of the land encompassed by the so-called Green Line, the pre-1967 border between Israel and the occupied territories. And since 1967, Israel has expanded into the occupied West Bank, building more than 280 illegal settlements for more than 600,000 Jewish Israeli citizens — in breach of international law and UN resolutions.

B’Tselem concludes: “The bar for defining the Israeli regime as an apartheid regime has been met after considering the accumulation of policies and laws that Israel devised to entrench its control over Palestinians.”

B’Tselem spokesman Hagai el-Ad said: “Israel is not a democracy that has a temporary occupation attached to it: it is one regime between the Jordan river to the Mediterranean sea, and we must look at the full picture and see it for what it is: apartheid.

“This sobering look at reality need not lead to despair, but quite the opposite. It is a call for change. After all, people created this regime, and people can change it.”