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"Meanwhile, NGO Monitor accused Amnesty on Monday of deliberately releasing the report to coincide with another organization’s US speaking tour that linked Israeli water policy to apartheid-type practices. "Amnesty’s report provides legitimacy for a speaking tour beginning November 1 at universities in the US organized by the Palestinian Cultural Academic Boycott of Israel (PCABI) movement entitled ‘Israel’s Control of Water as a Tool of Apartheid and Means of Ethnic Cleansing.’ The main speaker, Omar Barghouti, is a leader of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel," a statement from the organization said. In advance of Amnesty’s report, NGO Monitor’s president, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, said, "Amnesty’s report manipulates the issue of water and ignores the complexities of history and law in order to again falsely portray Israel as a brutal regime. Rather than recognize that water supply is a complex regional issue, Amnesty focuses only on Palestinian shortages." He added that "the report adopts a painfully simplistic narrative which places blame solely on Israel, to the extent that the Palestinian leadership is absolved of responsibility for the agreements signed under the Oslo framework." However, Amnesty International flatly denied to The Jerusalem Post any connection to the lecture series. "We are definitely not releasing the report to coincide with any other organization or activist’s activities," Amnesty Israel spokeswoman Dana Zimmerman told the Post."We have not shared the report with anyone ahead of its release except for media outlets. The timing of the release was decided according to the publication schedule of the president of Amnesty International.""