According to the United States Department of State[a] and international, Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, there have been credible reports of human rights violations committed against Palestinians by Israel, some amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Reports of human rights violations against Palestinians by Israel include reports of illegal or random killings, random or unwarranted detention (both of Palestinians in Israel and the occupied territories) restrictions on Palestinians residing in Jerusalem including random or illegal interference with privacy, family, and home, considerable interference with the freedom of peaceful assembly and association, limiting and occasionally restricting access to the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound, random or illegal interference with privacy, punishment of family members for alleged offenses by a relative, restrictions on freedom of expression and media including censorship, illegal routine harassment of nongovernmental organizations, unlawful exercise of physical force or intimidation and threats of violence against Palestinians, targeted killings of Palestinians, and labor rights abuses against Palestinian workers. In addition, human rights organizations have described the state of Israel as an apartheid regime.[1][2][3][4]
Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip has been described as a form of collective punishment and a serious violation of international humanitarian law.[5][6] Israel's military campaigns in the Gaza Strip include Operation Cast Lead which was described by the UN Fact Finding Mission as a "a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability."[7]
Israel has also long been accused of illegally harvesting organs of Palestinians. The first evidence of illegal organ harvesting of Palestinians dates back to the early 1990s.[8][9][10] Israel has admitted that Israeli pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians without the consent of their families,[11][12] and the first Israeli heart transplant was in fact a stolen Palestinian's organ.[13] Some Israeli physicians have spoken against illegal organ harvesting of Palestinians that is performed without family approval.[14]
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