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BEIRUT, March 17 (Xinhua) -- UN official Rima Khalaf resigned Friday after refusing the secretary general request to withdraw a report in which she accused Israel of being an "apartheid state."
At a press conference held here, Khalaf, under-secretary general and executive secretary at the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), said the secretary general asked her Thursday morning to withdraw the report.
"I asked him to rethink his decision, but he insisted," she stressed. "So I submitted my resignation from the UN."
"We expected of course that Israel and its allies would put huge pressure on him so that he would disavow the report, and that they would ask him to withdraw it," she said.
Khalaf explained that she simply resigned because of her duties force her not to "conceal a testimony about a crime committed that caused all this suffering to those many people."
The ESCWA report entitled "Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid" concluded that "available evidence established beyond a reasonable doubt that Israel is guilty of policies and practices that constitute the crime of apartheid."
Khalaf's analysis showed that "Israel is guilty of imposing an apartheid regime on the Palestinian people, which amounts to the commission of a crime against humanity."
