Growing use of apartheid label for Israel 'a wake up call', Israeli ex-negotiator concedes

Growing use of the word apartheid as a descriptor for Israel's rule over Palestinians must serve as a "wake up call", a former Israeli negotiator told the United Nations on Thursday.

Daniel Levy, who was an official negotiator for the Israeli government at the Oslo talks, made the comments at a UN Security Council session on the situation in the Middle East region, where speakers said they were alarmed by Israel's bombing of the besieged Gaza Strip and the raiding of NGO offices in the occupied West Bank.

"We know of certain developments that can at the same time be both politically uncomfortable and politically salient. The increasingly weighty body of scholarly, legal and public opinion that has designated Israel to be perpetrating apartheid in the territories under its control is just such a development," Levy said.

International human rights groups have used apartheid, a term first used to refer to South Africa's 20th-century regime of racial segregation, to describe Israel's control over the occupied Palestinian territories.

Amnesty International released an extensive report at the beginning of this year that accused Israel of committing the "crime of apartheid".

Israel lashed out at Amnesty for the report and has sought to limit the human rights group's operations in the country.

Global governments including that of South Africa have also accused Israel of acting as an apartheid state.

Levy said the significance of the use of the term by rights groups and by Arab, African and Islamic groups at the UN Human Rights Council earlier this year could not be ignored.

"It will come as little surprise if this echoes and resonates in parts of the world that have experienced apartheid and settler colonialism and have gone through decolonisation," Levy, who was once a senior advisor to the Israeli prime minister's office, told the council.

"It is a paradigm that will also bring the discrimination faced by Palestinian citizens of Israel into sharper relief."

Earlier this month, Israel bombed the Gaza Strip for three days, saying that this was to target the Islamic Jihad group.

It killed 49 Palestinians in the bombing and injured hundreds more.

Israeli forces last week raided the offices of several Palestinian NGOs operating in the occupied West Bank, sparking international condemnation.

It had classified six of the raided NGOs as terror organisations last year.