Former U.N. chief says Israel’s treatment of Palestinians may constitute apartheid

TEL AVIV, Israel — Israel is inching toward apartheid and drifting further away from the hopes of creating a Palestinian state alongside it, former United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told The Associated Press Thursday on a visit to the region.

Ban said that throughout his three-day visit, which coincided with a spike in deadly violence in the West Bank, he encountered a bleaker reality than the one he faced while head of the world body from 2007 to 2016. He said he had seen signs, through expanding West Bank Jewish settlements and tighter restrictions against Palestinians, that an apartheid system was taking root.

Ban was in the region on behalf of The Elders, a group of statespeople that engages in peacemaking and human rights initiatives around the world. Along with the group’s chair, former Irish President Mary Robinson, he met with Israeli and Palestinian leaders and civil society. It was from local rights groups that he said he heard that Israel was committing the crime of apartheid.

Leading rights groups in Israel and abroad have accused Israel and its 56-year occupation of the West Bank of morphing into an apartheid system that they say gives Palestinians second-class status and is designed to maintain Jewish hegemony from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Rights groups point to discriminatory policies within Israel and in annexed east Jerusalem, Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, which has been ruled by the Hamas militant group since 2007, and its occupation of the West Bank, where it exerts overall control, maintains a two-tier legal system and is building and expanding Jewish settlements.

Israel rejects any allegation of apartheid and says its own Arab citizens enjoy equal rights. Israel granted limited autonomy to the internationally recognized Palestinian Authority, which is based in the West Bank, at the height of the peace process in the 1990s and withdrew its soldiers and settlers from Gaza in 2005. It says the West Bank is disputed territory and that its fate should be determined in negotiations.