No court has entered a binding judgment or a criminal conviction holding that Israel commits the crime of apartheid. One judicial instrument addresses the question: an advisory opinion delivered by the International Court of Justice on 19 July 2024, which held that Israel’s legislation and measures in the occupied Palestinian territory breach Article 3 of the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the article that obliges states to prevent and eradicate racial segregation and apartheid without defining any crime. Three separate instruments carry the term in international law and they set three different tests, and Israel has ratified one of the three. The disagreement runs on the elements, principally intent, the meaning of “racial group”, and whether the measures form a single institutionalized regime, rather than on the wording of the definitions.
Key Findings
- Three instruments carry the term and impose different standards: Article 3 of the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination obliges states to prevent, prohibit and eradicate apartheid and defines no crime; Article II of the 1973 Apartheid Convention defines a crime turning on purpose; Article 7(2)(h) of the Rome Statute, in force 1 July 2002, requires inhumane acts inside an institutionalized regime committed with the intention of maintaining it.
- Israel is not a party to the 1973 Apartheid Convention; it ratified the 1965 Convention on 3 January 1979; it signed the Rome Statute on 31 December 2000 and informed the United Nations Secretary-General on 28 August 2002 that it does not intend to become a party, per the depositary status records of the United Nations Treaty Collection.
- Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, enacted by the Knesset in 2018, provides at clause 1(c) that realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel “is exclusive to the Jewish People”, and at clause 7 that the state “views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value”. The enacted text contains no equality clause.
- The Supreme Court of Israel dismissed fifteen petitions against that law on 8 July 2021 in HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, upholding it while holding that the Knesset, even acting by Basic Law, may not deny the state’s core identity as a Jewish and democratic state.
- Dugard and Reynolds (2013, European Journal of International Law 24(3), peer-reviewed) argue that Palestinians satisfy the “racial group” element on a socially constructed reading of the term; the Rome Statute of 1998 uses the phrase in Article 7 and defines it nowhere.
Has any court ruled that Israel commits the crime of apartheid?
One judicial instrument on the record addresses apartheid and Israel: the advisory opinion delivered by the International Court of Justice on 19 July 2024, which stated at paragraph 229 that Israel’s legislation and measures in the occupied Palestinian territory breach Article 3 of the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Under Article 65 of the Court’s Statute, an advisory opinion carries no binding force.
The provision the Court ran through is the one that pairs two terms. Article 3 of the 1965 Convention reads, in the treaty text, that states parties “particularly condemn racial segregation and apartheid” and undertake to prevent, prohibit and eradicate all practices of that nature in territories under their jurisdiction. It creates a state obligation. It does not define a crime, name an intent element, or attach individual criminal liability, so a finding of breach under Article 3 and a determination that the crime of apartheid has been committed are findings under different provisions.
Several judges addressed apartheid at greater length in separate and individual opinions appended to the 2024 opinion. Appended opinions are the writing of individual judges and are not part of the Court’s holding, so the distinction between what the Court found and what a judge wrote alongside it is load-bearing here.
Beyond that opinion the judicial record is empty on this specific question. There is no contentious-case judgment between states on apartheid concerning Israel, and no criminal conviction of any person for the crime of apartheid arising from Israeli conduct. Advisory proceedings answer a question referred by an authorised organ rather than resolving a dispute between parties, and they produce no order, no remedy and no enforceable obligation. That is the whole of the court record, and it is the reason the two most-cited conclusions on this question come from documents that are not judgments at all.
Is it often said that Israel’s rule meets the legal definition?
Three dated determinations carry the claim. Human Rights Watch published A Threshold Crossed on 27 April 2021; Amnesty International published Israel’s Apartheid against Palestinians on 1 February 2022; and the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 reported to the Human Rights Council in March 2022. Each is a body’s own determination, applying the treaty wording to facts it assembled itself.
The premise of the question is directionally accurate and easy to check. These are real documents with real dates, and they say what they are said to say. Amnesty International’s 2022 report describes an “institutionalised regime of oppression and domination”, and states that its conclusion applies wherever Israel “has exercised control over Palestinians’ lives since 1948”, which is a determination about Israel and the occupied territory together rather than about the occupied territory alone. Human Rights Watch’s 2021 report sets out the test in three elements: an intent to maintain domination by one racial group over another, systematic oppression, and inhumane acts. The UN Special Rapporteur’s March 2022 report applied the same three-element structure to the occupied territory.
What separates these documents from the instrument in the previous section is class, not credibility. An organisation or a mandate holder reads the definition, gathers a record, and publishes a conclusion; a tribunal receives a case, hears both parties under a jurisdictional grant, and enters a finding that binds someone. The three determinations above are the first kind. Each identifies its own evidentiary base and its own reading of the definitional elements, and each says so on its face.
The elements they resolve are the elements the treaties leave open. Intent to maintain a regime, the meaning of “racial group”, and whether a set of measures constitutes one institutionalized regime or several administrative and security systems are questions the texts pose without answering, and the four sections that follow read what the texts actually say about each.
What does the treaty definition of apartheid actually require?
Three instruments carry the term and they impose three different standards. The lightest is Article 3 of the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, adopted 21 December 1965 and in force 4 January 1969: states “particularly condemn racial segregation and apartheid” and undertake to prevent, prohibit and eradicate it. No crime is defined and no intent element appears.
The 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, adopted 30 November 1973 and in force 18 July 1976, is the first criminal definition. Article II applies to enumerated inhuman acts, including denial of the right to life and liberty, deliberate imposition of living conditions calculated to cause destruction of a group, and legislative measures dividing the population along racial lines, when they are committed “for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them”. The operative words are purpose and systematically.
The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, adopted 17 July 1998 and in force 1 July 2002, lists “the crime of apartheid” at Article 7(1)(j) as a crime against humanity and defines it at Article 7(2)(h) as inhumane acts of a character similar to the other listed crimes against humanity, “committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime”. It requires the regime to be institutionalized and the intention to be directed at maintaining it.
| Instrument | What it requires | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, Article 3 (in force 1969) | A state obligation to prevent, prohibit and eradicate racial segregation and apartheid. No crime, no intent element. | Treaty text (primary record) |
| 1973 Apartheid Convention, Article II (in force 1976) | Enumerated inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining racial domination and systematically oppressing the group | Treaty text (primary record) |
| Rome Statute, Articles 7(1)(j) and 7(2)(h) (in force 2002) | Inhumane acts within an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination, with the intention of maintaining that regime | Treaty text (primary record) |
Source: treaty texts as adopted, dated to entry into force.
Do Palestinians count as a racial group under the treaties?
Only one of the three instruments defines the group element. Article 1(1) of the 1965 Convention defines racial discrimination to include any distinction based on “race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin”, wording that on its face reaches national and ethnic groups. The Rome Statute of 1998 uses “racial group” at Article 7(2)(h) and defines the term nowhere in the treaty.
Dugard and Reynolds (2013, European Journal of International Law 24(3), peer-reviewed) argue that this gap is filled by reading “racial group” as a socially constructed category rather than a biological one, and that the 1965 Convention’s descent and national-origin language supplies the construction for the criminal provisions as well. On that reading, the identification of Palestinians and Israeli Jews as distinct groups by the legal and administrative arrangements themselves is what satisfies the element. A legal analysis submitted to the UN Commission of Inquiry in 2022 by the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic with Addameer applies the same construction to the West Bank.
The objection runs on the same silence. Article 7(2)(h) leaves the term undefined, and no tribunal has construed “racial group” in that provision in relation to Israel and the Palestinians. That absence is a plain feature of the record rather than an argument either way: it means the group element in the criminal definitions currently rests on scholarly and organisational construction of a treaty term rather than on a judicial interpretation of it.
The question’s own phrase, racial domination, therefore names a contested element and not a settled premise. Under the 1965 Convention the wording is broad enough that national and ethnic origin fall inside it, which is why that Convention is the instrument the group question is least fought over. Under the two criminal definitions the term is open, and any determination that the element is met identifies whose construction it is following. The published determinations in the second section state that they follow the socially constructed reading.
Must the conduct resemble southern Africa to qualify?
The two criminal instruments part company on exactly this point. Article II of the 1973 Apartheid Convention defines the crime to cover the enumerated inhuman acts “including similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern Africa”. Article 7(2)(h) of the Rome Statute, adopted in 1998, drops the reference to southern Africa entirely.
What turns on the phrase is whether it is a benchmark or a description of origin. A reading that treats “as practised in southern Africa” as a definitional threshold requires a claimant to show resemblance to the specific legal architecture of that historical system, which is the objection most often raised against the label: the arrangements do not look like the pass laws and the population registration of that state. Dugard and Reynolds (2013, European Journal of International Law, peer-reviewed) argue the opposite reading, that the phrase records the historical circumstance that produced the treaty and does not confine the crime to replicas of it.
The Rome Statute settles the point for its own provision by omission. A charge under Article 7(1)(j) would be tried against the elements written in Article 7(2)(h), which name an institutionalized regime, systematic oppression and domination, and the intention of maintaining that regime, and which contain no comparative clause at all. Resemblance to southern Africa would be neither an element to prove nor a defence to raise.
Two consequences follow for how the debate is conducted. First, an argument that the arrangements are unlike apartheid-era southern Africa is an argument about the 1973 text and does not reach the 2002 definition. Second, an argument built on the 1973 definition runs into the ratification record, because that is the instrument Israel has not joined, which is the subject of the next section.
Is Israel bound by the treaties that define the crime?
Of the three instruments, Israel has ratified one. It ratified the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination on 3 January 1979; it is not a party to the 1973 Apartheid Convention; and it signed the Rome Statute on 31 December 2000 before informing the United Nations Secretary-General on 28 August 2002 that it does not intend to become a party, per the depositary status records of the United Nations Treaty Collection.
That record explains the shape of the 2024 advisory opinion described earlier. The instrument in force between Israel and the Convention’s other parties is the 1965 Convention, whose Article 3 prohibits apartheid as a state obligation, and that is the article the finding of breach was entered under rather than either criminal definition. Under Article 9 of the same Convention, parties submit periodic reports on the measures they have adopted to the treaty’s committee, which is the standing channel through which Israel’s own account of its compliance enters the record.
Non-party status has a different effect in each direction. It removes the 1973 Convention’s crime definition, with its southern Africa clause, from the set of provisions binding on Israel as a treaty matter. It does not by itself remove the Rome Statute’s definition from reach, because the Statute’s jurisdiction runs on territory as well as nationality, which the following section takes up.
Which crimes has the International Criminal Court actually charged?
Apartheid appears in none of the charges on the public record. The arrest warrants issued in the Situation in the State of Palestine on 21 November 2024 list the war crime of starvation of civilians as a method of warfare and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts. Article 7(1)(j), the crime of apartheid, is not among them.
Jurisdiction over the crime exists. Pre-Trial Chamber I decided on 5 February 2021 that the Court’s territorial jurisdiction in the situation extends to Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which is the basis on which conduct connected to that territory can come before the Court whatever the ratification status of an accused person’s state of nationality. Any crime within Article 7, including apartheid, sits inside that territorial grant as a matter of the Statute’s own terms.
Reaching a charge requires two further steps that have not occurred for this provision. Under Article 15 the Prosecutor applies, and under Article 58 a Pre-Trial Chamber decides whether the material establishes reasonable grounds to believe the person committed the crime and issues the warrant accordingly. No application for a charge under Article 7(1)(j) in this situation appears on the public record, and no chamber has ruled on the elements of apartheid in it.
The absence is worth stating flatly and without inference. It records the state of the docket, which is that the crimes charged to date are starvation, murder, persecution and other inhumane acts, and it says nothing about whether an apartheid charge could be brought or would succeed. It also marks where the two classes of document separate again: the determinations of 2021 and 2022 addressed the elements of Article 7(2)(h) directly, and the institution that would try those elements has not been presented with them.
What do Israel’s own enacted texts and rulings record?
Israel’s enacted constitutional text contains an exclusivity clause. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People, passed by the Knesset in 2018, provides at clause 1(c) that “the realization of the right to national self-determination in the State of Israel is exclusive to the Jewish People”, in the Knesset’s own English translation, which it labels unofficial. Clause 7 provides that the state “views the development of Jewish settlement as a national value”.
Clause 4 makes Hebrew the language of the state, gives Arabic “a special status”, and preserves the status Arabic held in practice before the law came into force. The enacted text carries no equality clause and no individual-rights clause, which is a fact about what the statute says rather than a finding about how anyone is treated. The founding instrument reads differently on that point: the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel, issued 14 May 1948, states that the state “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its citizens irrespective of religion, race or sex”.
The Supreme Court of Israel addressed the 2018 law directly. In HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset, heard by an eleven-justice panel on 22 December 2020 and decided on 8 July 2021, the Court dismissed fifteen petitions and upheld the Basic Law, while holding that the Knesset acting as constituent authority is “not all powerful” and has no authority, even by Basic Law, to deny the core character of the state as Jewish and democratic. Both halves are the ruling: the law stands, and the Court set a constitutional limit it held the law had not crossed.
The official population statistics record two populations counted by two authorities. The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics reported about 10.148 million residents in September 2025, of whom 2.130 million were counted as Arabs, 21.0% of the total, and its Jerusalem Day release of 2024 counted Jerusalem including the neighbourhoods annexed after 1967 as one municipal population, 39.5% of it Arab. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza in its 2017 census.
What would a binding apartheid ruling actually require?
A binding determination has two procedural routes and neither is currently carrying the question. A contentious case at the International Court of Justice requires state consent or a treaty clause under Article 36 of the Court’s Statute, and Article 22 of the 1965 Convention supplies such a clause for disputes over its interpretation or application.
The case South Africa filed on 29 December 2023 was brought under the 1948 Genocide Convention, not under the 1965 Convention and not under an apartheid instrument.
The criminal route runs through the Rome Statute provisions named above: an application by the Prosecutor under Article 15 and confirmation by a Pre-Trial Chamber under Article 58, followed by trial on the elements of Article 7(2)(h). That route would put the contested elements, the institutionalized regime, the intention of maintaining it, and the construction of “racial group”, before a chamber for decision rather than for argument.
The third route is the one already used, and it is the weakest in effect. Article 65 of the Court’s Statute empowers the Court to give an advisory opinion on any legal question at the request of an authorised body, and such an opinion is delivered without binding force, without parties bound by it and without a remedy attached. The 2024 opinion described in the first section is that instrument.
So the procedural position can be stated exactly. The treaty clause that would found a contested case on the 1965 Convention exists and has not been invoked for this question; the criminal provision that would try the apartheid elements exists, sits inside a territorial jurisdiction the Court affirmed in 2021, and has not been charged; and the one instrument delivered came through the advisory function, which produces no binding determination. That is the mechanism behind the observation that the question remains legally unresolved, set out in the specific steps it would take to resolve it.
Methodology and limitations
This report reads four kinds of record: the texts of the three instruments that carry the term apartheid, the depositary status records showing which of them Israel has joined, the judicial and charging record on the question, and Israel’s own enacted texts, court judgment and official population statistics. Where a body’s published conclusion is described, it is identified as that body’s own determination on its own reading of the definition and its own evidentiary base, dated, and distinguished from an adjudicated finding.
The frame is the legal standard and the documented record around it. Every treaty provision is quoted or paraphrased from the instrument as adopted, with the adoption and entry-into-force dates given, because the three definitions differ and a claim tested against one is not tested against the others.
Limitations. An advisory opinion carries no binding force under Article 65 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, and separate opinions appended by individual judges are not part of a holding; both distinctions are stated wherever the 2024 opinion is described. Determinations published by organisations and by mandate holders are conclusions, not judgments, and their reasoning and evidentiary bases are their own. The Knesset labels its English translation of the 2018 Basic Law unofficial. Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s total, a scope choice different from the convention used by international monitors, and its two named population groups do not sum to its published total because foreign residents are counted in the total and outside both groups. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics census of 2017 is the most recent full enumeration of the West Bank and Gaza, so later totals in that series are projections from it.
The literature disagreement is named where it arises. Dugard and Reynolds (2013, European Journal of International Law 24(3), peer-reviewed) argue that “racial group” should be read as a socially constructed category and that the 1973 Convention’s southern Africa clause is historical framing rather than a threshold; the opposing readings hold that the term is undefined in the Rome Statute and unconstrued by any tribunal for this case, and that the 1973 clause functions as a benchmark. No tribunal has decided either point in this context.
Conclusion
The question asks whether a system meets a definition, and the definition turns out to be three definitions. Article 3 of the 1965 Convention prohibits apartheid without defining a crime, and it is the instrument Israel ratified in 1979 and the article the one advisory opinion on record, delivered 19 July 2024, found breached. Article II of the 1973 Convention defines a crime by purpose and includes the southern Africa comparison, and Israel is not a party to it. Article 7(2)(h) of the Rome Statute defines the crime by an institutionalized regime plus the intention of maintaining it, drops the comparison, and has not been charged in the situation where the Court affirmed territorial jurisdiction in 2021.
What the records hold is therefore specific rather than blank. Three dated determinations, from 2021 and 2022, apply the three-element test and conclude that it is met. Israel’s own enacted text reserves realization of national self-determination exclusively to the Jewish People and names Jewish settlement development a national value, its Supreme Court upheld that text on 8 July 2021 while holding the Knesset could not deny the state’s democratic core, and its statistical bureau counted 2.130 million Arab residents inside a total of 10.148 million in September 2025 while a separate authority counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza in 2017. The contested elements are intent, the construction of “racial group”, and whether the measures form one regime; each is contested because the texts leave it open, not because the facts are hidden.
That gap between a term with a legal test and a term in general use is where this question does its other work. The word travels through public argument carrying the authority of law while the elements it names sit undecided, and the arguments made in its name reach far past the treaty provisions they invoke. If a legal characterisation can circulate as settled while its group element remains unconstrued by any tribunal, what happens to the discourse built on top of it, and what does that discourse then carry into the way a population is spoken about?
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the 2024 advisory opinion rely on the 1965 Convention rather than the Rome Statute?
The 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination is the instrument Israel ratified, on 3 January 1979, per the United Nations Treaty Collection depositary records. Its Article 3 obliges parties to prevent, prohibit and eradicate racial segregation and apartheid, which is a state obligation rather than a crime definition.
What is the difference between an advisory opinion and a judgment?
An advisory opinion is given under Article 65 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice at the request of an authorised body and carries no binding force, no parties bound by it and no remedy. A judgment in a contentious case requires jurisdiction founded on state consent or a treaty clause under Article 36 of the same Statute.
Can a person be charged with apartheid if their state is not party to the Rome Statute?
Pre-Trial Chamber I decided on 5 February 2021 that the Court’s territorial jurisdiction in the Situation in the State of Palestine extends to Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and the Statute’s jurisdiction runs on territory as well as nationality. A charge would still require an application under Article 15 and confirmation under Article 58.
Does the 1973 Apartheid Convention only cover southern Africa?
Article II of the 1973 Convention, in force 18 July 1976, defines the crime to include “similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination as practised in southern Africa”. Dugard and Reynolds (2013, European Journal of International Law, peer-reviewed) read that phrase as historical framing rather than a required threshold, and opposing readings treat it as a benchmark.
What does the 2018 Basic Law say about Arabic?
Clause 4 of Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People makes Hebrew the language of the state, gives Arabic “a special status”, and provides that nothing in the article compromises the status Arabic held in practice before the law came into force, in the Knesset’s unofficial English translation.
How does Israel report on its compliance with the 1965 Convention?
Article 9 of the Convention requires each party to submit periodic reports to the treaty’s committee on the legislative, judicial, administrative and other measures it has adopted. Israel has been a party since 3 January 1979, so that reporting channel is where its own account of compliance is filed.
Who counts the Palestinian population, and when was it last enumerated?
The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics counted 4,780,978 residents of the West Bank and Gaza in its 2017 census, the most recent full enumeration, so later totals in that series are projections. The Israel Central Bureau of Statistics separately counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s own total.
Sources
- Dugard, J., and Reynolds, J., 2013. Apartheid, International Law, and the Occupied Palestinian Territory. European Journal of International Law, 24(3). https://academic.oup.com/ejil/article/24/3/867/481600. Peer-reviewed.
- Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic, with Addameer, 2022. Submission to the UN Commission of Inquiry: legal analysis of apartheid in the occupied West Bank. https://hrp.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/IHRC-Addameer-Submission-to-HRC-COI-Apartheid-in-WB.pdf. Legal analysis.
- International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, 1965. Adopted 21 December 1965, in force 4 January 1969. Articles 1, 3, 9 and 22. Treaty text, primary record.
- International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, 1973. Adopted 30 November 1973, in force 18 July 1976. Article II. Treaty text, primary record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2024. Selected Data on the Occasion of Jerusalem Day, 2024. Media Release 165/2024. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2024/165/11_24_165e.pdf. Official record.
- Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, 2025. Population of Israel on the Eve of Rosh Hashana 5786. https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2025/304/11_25_304e.pdf. Official record.
- Knesset, 2018. Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. Official (unofficial English) translation. https://main.knesset.gov.il/EN/activity/documents/BasicLawsPDF/BasicLawNationState.pdf. Official record, enacted legislation.
- Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, 2018. Population, Housing and Establishments Census 2017: Final Results. Ramallah. pcbs.gov.ps. Official record, national census.
- Provisional Government of Israel, 1948. Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel. Official Gazette Number 1, 14 May 1948. Official record, founding instrument.
- Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, 1998. Adopted 17 July 1998, in force 1 July 2002. Articles 7(1)(j), 7(2)(h), 15 and 58. Treaty text, primary record.
- Statute of the International Court of Justice, 1945. Articles 36 and 65. Treaty text, primary record.
- Supreme Court of Israel sitting as High Court of Justice, 2021. HCJ 5555/18 Hasson v. Knesset. Judgment of 8 July 2021. Official record, court judgment.
- United Nations Treaty Collection, depositary status records for the 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, the 1973 Apartheid Convention and the Rome Statute. Primary record, treaty depositary.