US rights report keeps Trump language on Israel, Palestinian territories
The Israel section of the annual rights report included a section on “Israel, West Bank and Gaza," rather than "Israel and the Occupied Territories."
In its annual report on human rights abuses around the world, the State Department continued a Trump administration practice of dropping the term “Occupied Territories” from its section on Israel.
In the congressionally mandated report, the State Department in 2018 nixed the word “occupied” from the title of the Israel section, a move that critics said reflected President Donald Trump’s bias against the Palestinians.
The Biden administration’s report kept Trump's revised country chapter title, “Israel, West Bank and Gaza.” Under the Obama administration, the section was titled "Israel and the Occupied Territories."
The report, however, does reference “the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem territories that Israel occupied during the June 1967 war.”
