South Africa’s role in the draft UN Treaty on Crimes Against Humanity

It was August 2023, and I felt I was being transported back to the 1980s, to my childhood in South Africa. Before me lay a sprawling village of tightly packed, squat concrete structures with corrugated metal roofs wending along slender dirt roads. It was my 13th trip to document human rights conditions in and around Israeli-occupied Palestinian Territory in 11 years. On this visit, as I stopped in Palestinian Bedouin communities in al-Naqab, I felt I could have been visiting apartheid-era black townships.