A Red Cross vehicle at the Rafah border crossing between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Photo: Abed Rahim Khatib /Flash 90.

JNS.org – An International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) official said in a rare interview with an Israeli newspaper this week that Israel is not an “apartheid state.”

Jacques de Maio — head of the ICRC delegation to Israel and the Palestinian Authority — told Yedioth Ahronoth, “There isn’t a regime here that is based on the superiority of one race over another; there is no disenfranchisement of basic human rights based on so-called racial inferiority.”

He added that the ICRC “was very familiar with the regime in South Africa during Apartheid” and he could attest to there being very different circumstances in Israel.

The ICRC official also detailed the Palestinian Authority’s attempts at political manipulation, including the lobbing of accusations that Israel carries out “extrajudicial killings.”

According to de Maio, the ICRC has worked with the IDF to clarify “the issue of shooting assailants who carry out terror attacks, and we reached an unequivocal conclusion that there is no IDF order to shoot suspects to kill.”

De Maio said that when the ICRC rejected this Palestinian charge against the IDF, there were “immediately those who claimed we were covering up war crimes committed by the IDF, and that we were serving the Zionists.”