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Head of UN agency resigns after refusing to retract report calling Israel an ‘apartheid regime’

posted on: Mar 18, 2017

By Allison Deger
Mondoweiss

Rima Khalaf, the head of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA). resigned today after she was asked to withdraw a report her agency published earlier this week that stated Israel is an “apartheid regime.”

“The secretary-general demanded yesterday that I withdraw the report, and I refused,”Khalaf told reporters at a press conference in Beirut today, according to the Middle East Eye.

“It was expected that Israel and its allies would put enormous pressure on the United Nations secretary general to renounce the report,” she also said, according to Reuters. Then Khalaf stated that the United Nations “had scrubbed the report from its website.”

While the webpage for the report, titled “Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid,” was removed, the link to the executive summary of the report is still active on the UN website here.

Here is the full report:

Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid by Mondoweiss on Scribd