text: Rima Khalaf, United Nations Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ESCWA, had said it was the first to accuse Israel of being a racist state which had established an apartheid system. The report itself said it had established on the "basis of scholarly inquiry and overwhelming evidence, that Israel is guilty of the crime of apartheid". Israel has condemned the report. "We expected of course that Israel and its allies would put huge pressure on the Secretary-General of the United Nations so that he would disavow the report, and that they would ask him to withdraw it," Khalaf said to AFP.
  The UN Secretary-General António Guterres had distanced himself from the report and the document was removed from UN website on Friday, March 17, 2017. The report Executive Summary was also deleted from the United Nations Information System on the Question of Palestine (UNISPAL).
  On March 17, Khalaf submitted her letter of resignation to Guterres. Following the strong response from Israel, she wrote: "It is only normal for criminals to pressure and attack those who advocate the cause of their victims." She continued to stand by the report.
  Women in the Judiciary
  In 2019, ESCWA reported regarding the situation of women in the judiciary system, in which only three countries had not appointed female judges yet, including Oman, Saudi Arabia and Somalia. Other countries which already had female judges were: Iraq (1959), Morocco (1961), Algeria (1962), Sudan (1965  or 1976), Lebanon and Tunisia (1966), Yemen (1971), Syria (1975), Palestine (1982), Libya (1991), Jordan (1996), Egypt (2003), Bahrain (2006), the United Arab Emirates (2008), Qatar (2010), Mauritania (2013), and Kuwait (2020). In June 2021, Egypt announced that female judges would take seats in Public Prosecution and State Council in October that year.