An independent UN investigator again took world nations to task Tuesday for not standing up to the US over sanctions it imposed on her — penalties that complicated her ability to deliver in person her latest assessment of Israeli human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories.
Calling the sanctions “unlawful and spiteful,” Francesca Albanese told the General Assembly via video from South Africa that it “should already have confronted this dangerous precedent.”
“These measures are an assault on the UN itself — on its independence, its integrity, its very soul,” she said before turning to her report on Gaza and the West Bank. Hours later, she told reporters that despite the unprecedented attacks against her as a UN investigator, powerful countries have not taken “concrete steps beyond declarations and condemnations” since the US decision this summer.
Albanese demurred when asked whether the United Nations and its officials, including Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, had supported her during this time, saying she'd rather not comment.
An Italian human rights lawyer, Albanese is a “special rapporteur" — an outside expert who is tapped by the UN Human Rights Council to assess human rights in a particular place or subject area. The rapporteurs have no formal authority, but their views can inform world opinion and prosecutors at the International Criminal Court and other venues.
As the special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza since May 2022, Albanese has issued trenchant critiques of Israel's policies in the territories and, especially, its war against Hamas in Gaza. She has repeatedly described Israel's actions as “genocide” and “apartheid.” Albanese repeated those assertions Tuesday as she described a Gaza that “remains strangled, starved, shattered” during a shaky ceasefire that she portrayed as far short of a plan for peace.
Israel and the US, its key ally, vociferously spurn Albanese's claims.
In response to her presentation Tuesday, Danny Danon, the Israeli ambassador to the UN, blasted her report as “shameful” and “one-sided" and disparaged Albanese personally, calling her a “witch.”
“She has taken the word ‘genocide,’ born from the ashes of the Holocaust, and turned it into a weapon, not to defend the victims of history, but to attack them,” Danon said during a UN committee meeting. Multiple other countries' representatives condemned his comments.
Israel has long taken issue with the Human Rights Council and its rapporteurs, seeing them as biased.
The State Department said in a statement released Tuesday evening that “Francesa Albanese has openly supported antisemitism, terrorism, and has engaged in lawfare against the United States and our interests. In light of these facts, she was sanctioned earlier this year and will not be granted a visa to travel to America.”
In announcing the sanctions against Albanese in July, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio made similar accusations, saying she had “spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel and the West.”
Albanese rejected those assertions and countered that she was being attacked for doing her job and that she wouldn't stop.
“I did everything I did in good faith, and knowing that, my commitment to justice is more important than personal interests,” she told The Associated Press in a July interview.
When the US imposed sanctions on Albanese, the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, called for their “prompt reversal.” The UN's chief spokesperson, Stéphane Dujarric, called the sanctions “unacceptable.”
The war in Gaza began when Hamas-led fighters stormed into Israel and killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 people captive on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel’s retaliatory campaign killed more than 67,000 people, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. It is part of the Hamas-run government and does not differentiate between combatants and civilians in its count, which the UN sees as a reliable estimate. The war also displaced the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, demolished much of its infrastructure and sparked widespread hunger.
More than two weeks after the ceasefire started and was quickly tested, tensions escalated Tuesday after Israel said Hamas had fired on its forces in southern Gaza and wasn't living up to the agreement's terms on the return of hostages' remains. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu then ordered the army to immediately carry out “powerful strikes,” and Hamas vowed to delay handing over the body of a hostage.
Albanese urged the UN's member countries to achieve a permanent end to the fighting in Gaza and a full Israeli withdrawal from the Palestinian territories.
“Calling a ceasefire a ‘peace plan’ while enabling occupation and killings to continue is not diplomacy. It is Orwellian doublespeak,” she said.
The US-brokered ceasefire was styled as the first stage of a peace plan that President Donald Trump aired last month.
