Iran calls for elimination of apartheid across globe, Palestine

On Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Nasser Kan'ani marked the day in a tweet that commemorated the South African icon as "the great hero of the fight against the apartheid" as well as "a friend of [Iran's] Revolution and the Islamic Republic."

"The world today is in need of Nelson Mandela's liberating thinking in [its efforts to] fight and eliminate apartheid across the world, especially in #Palestine," the tweet added.

South Africa was in the thrall of apartheid -- a system of extreme racial segregation of people -- for 46 years, between 1948 and 1994, under an all-white government that Mandela fiercely resisted.

On April 27, 1994, the country’s apartheid era ended and South Africans were finally allowed to cast their votes in the first free and democratic elections after years of heroic struggle led by the icon.

The Israeli regime has been practicing the same regime against Palestinians, though far more brutally and several times more deadly, since 1948, when it claimed existence across Palestine after a Western-backed war, during which tens of thousands of Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes, villages were depopulated, and thousands were killed.

The regime launched yet another such war in 1967, occupying the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, including East al-Quds that Palestinians want as the capital of their future state.

Ever since Israeli apartheid authorities have created a judicial system that allows them to steal Palestinians’ land and property and dispossess them in order to make way for illegal settlers.

Israeli military bulldozers roll into the occupied territory on a near-daily basis, forcing Palestinians from their homes, destroying their belongings in front of their eyes, and even making the uprooted people pay for the demolition of their property.