UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese delivered a report to the body’s Human Rights Council on Tuesday, claiming that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza since Oct. 7 amounts to genocide and calling on countries to impose sanctions and an arms embargo immediately.
“Following nearly 6 months of unrelenting Israeli assault on occupied #Gaza, it is my solemn duty to report on the worst of what humanity is capable of & to present my findings: 'the Anatomy of a Genocide'.”— Special Rapporteur @FranceskAlbs at @UN Human Rights Council.#HRC55 pic.twitter.com/N4K1Fh1lTn
— United Nations Human Rights Council | #HRC55 (@UN_HRC) March 26, 2024
“I find that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide against Palestinians as a group in Gaza has been met,” she told the UN rights body in Geneva.
Israel, which did not attend the session, rejected her findings.“Instead of seeking the truth, this Special Rapporteur tries to fit weak arguments to her distorted and obscene inversion of reality,” Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva said, adding that its war was against Hamas and not Palestinian civilians.
An earlier draft of the report, available online, presents the supposed genocide as “driven by a genocidal logic integral to [Israel’s] settler-colonial project in Palestine,” comparing Israel’s relationship with the Palestinians to the US’s relationship with Native Americans and drawing on a highly controversial interpretation of Israeli history.
In the report, the UN special rapporteur says that genocide has always been “an inevitable part of the forming of Israel,” claiming that “practices leading to the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s non-Jewish population occurred in 1947–1949,” as well as in 1967. The report does not mention either of the wars fought during those respective periods.
The report addresses Israel’s evacuation notices and the creation of safe zones and humanitarian corridors in Gaza, alleging that “the sheer scale of evacuations amidst an intense bombing campaign and the haphazardly communicated safe zones system, along with extended communications blackouts, increased levels of panic, forced displacement, and mass killings.”
Albanese goes on to suggest that these measures were disguised instruments to corral Palestinian civilians, who were then targeted. “Simply put,” the report says, “‘safe areas’ were deliberately turned into areas of mass killing.” It is reasonable to infer, Albanese concludes, “that evacuation orders and safe zones have been used as genocidal tools to achieve ethnic cleansing.”
Gulf nations voiced support for the findings
Gulf nations such as Qatar and African countries, including Algeria and Mauritania, voiced support for Albanese’s findings and alarm at the humanitarian situation.
The seats for Israel’s ally, the United States, were left empty. Washington has previously accused the Council of chronic anti-Israel bias.
In the past, Albanese’s comments on the Israel-Hamas conflict have drawn scrutiny, including from a US ambassador in Geneva who said she has a history of using “antisemitic tropes.”
Report does not discuss Oct. 7 attack, but condemns "crimes" by Hamas
Israel launched an offensive in Gaza against the Hamas jihadist group, which has governed the Strip since 2007, following Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel on October 7.
Hamas’s attack, launched by thousands of organized terrorists, involved the murder of over 1,200 Israelis, including about 300 people at a music festival and civilian families in border area communities, many of whom were raped and burned. That day, Hamas and allied terrorist groups also kidnapped more than 240 people, 134 of whom are still being held hostage in the Gaza Strip.
The war has resulted in the deaths of some 32,414 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza. Those numbers cannot be independently verified, and they do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Israel says it has killed some 13,000 Hamas and allied terrorists, suggesting a civilian-to-combatant ratio of about 2:1, on the low end of the expected range for urban warfare.
Albanese said in the report that she “firmly condemns the crimes committed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in Israel on 7 October and urges accountability and the release of hostages.” The report, she added, does not examine those events because they are “beyond the geographic scope of her mandate.”
Tzvi Joffre and Reuters contributed to this report.