(Israel Hayom via JNS) The Palestinian Authority welcomed Amnesty International’s report accusing Israel of apartheid, and urged the U.N. General Assembly and Security Council to impose sanctions on the Jewish state. The P.A. also called on the International Criminal Court at The Hague to launch an investigation into Israel’s “crime against humanity of apartheid without delay.”

The P.A. Foreign Ministry said in a statement that “Amnesty International joins a long list of distinguished Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations and experts in exposing Israel’s colonial occupation for what it is: an institutionalized system of oppression and domination over the Palestinian people, designed to legitimize its colonial settlement expansion, deny the Palestinian people their inalienable right to self-determination, and erase Palestinian history, present, and future in their homeland.”

It described the report as “a detailed affirmation of the cruel reality of entrenched racism, exclusion, oppression, colonialism, apartheid, and attempted erasure that the Palestinian people have endured since the [1948] nakba [catastrophe].”