Geneva, Switzerland — A UN rights expert reiterated on Monday that Israel was committing “genocide” in Gaza, slamming what she said was the “complicity” of other countries as “the shame of our time”.
“Far too many states continue to look away, normalize the suffering and even profit from it,” Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, told reporters in Geneva.
“Arms trade and diplomatic engagement with Israel continue unabated,” she said.
“This is not just morally wrong, this is unlawful,” she insisted, demanding “accountability (for) the very people who have been giving orders to continue trade and arms transfers toward Israel”.
UN special rapporteurs are independent experts who are mandated by the UN Human Rights Council but do not speak on behalf of the UN.
The Italian expert has faced harsh criticism by Israel and some of its allies over her relentless criticism and long-standing accusations that Israel is committing “genocide” in Gaza.
The war erupted nearly two years ago after Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, resulting in the deaths of 1,219 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally of official figures.
Israel’s retaliatory campaign in Gaza has killed nearly 65,000 people, also mostly civilians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry in figures that the UN considers reliable.
But Albanese on Monday suggested the true number could be 10 times that.
In an unprecedented move, Washington slapped sanctions on Albanese in July, calling her work “biased and malicious”.
Albanese reiterated that the US sanctions against her, alongside sanctions against International Criminal Court judges, were “unacceptable”.
She highlighted that the United States had for decades backed the Israeli government “militarily, politically, diplomatically, strategically, discursively”.
But under the current administration of President Donald Trump, she cautioned that support had “passed the Rubicon”.
Albanese warned that history would not look kindly on the United States or other countries that continue to provide support for Israel amid growing accusations of genocide.
“Not that this is the first genocide that has been known,” she said, pointing to the Holocaust, the Bosnia genocide and the Rwanda genocide as events that “were also known to the people of the time”.
Albanese added that “this genocide has something different, is openly incited, cynically denied and relentlessly supported, armed and weaponized, while those who oppose it are silenced, beaten, criminalized and smeared”.
“This is the shame of our time.”
The rapporteur said she had “asked prime ministers, presidents, foreign ministers, so-called world leaders” the same question: “How do you sleep? When will you act?”
