Gaza war: UN rights expert accuses Israel of acts of genocide

A UN human rights expert says she believes Israel has committed “acts of genocide” in Gaza.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, presented her report to UN member states in Geneva on Tuesday.

But Israel has already dismissed her findings.

This comes amid growing international pressure on Israel to stop the war or to do much more to protect civilians.

Ms. Albanese concluded 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”.

Before Ms. Albanese even got to her feet, her findings had been dismissed by Israel, whose Ambassador described it as “an outrageous distortion of the Genocide Convention”.

Israel has for years been angered by the UN Human Rights Council’s agenda, which permanently devotes an entire section; Item 7 to scrutiny of the situation in “Palestine and the other occupied Arab territories”.

The agenda item was approved not by the UN itself, but by UN member states, decades ago, and has never expired. No other country in the world has permanent scrutiny like this, and Israel views it as discriminatory, and aimed at delegitimising Israel. It refuses to attend the council when Item 7 is under discussion.

But many countries, in particular those in the Middle East, argue that the situation in the absence of self-determination for Palestinians through a two-state solution requires ongoing investigation, and now that there is another conflict, all the more so.

Since Hamas’s brutal attack on Israel on 7 October, Ms. Albanese has called for the release of the hostages, and does so again in this report. In it she “firmly condemns the crimes committed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in Israel on 7 October”.

But she has also been outspoken in her criticism of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza.

Ms. Albanese’s choice of a title for it: ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ was not exactly diplomatic. Many member states, especially those traditionally supportive of Israel, will be uncomfortable.

But UN special rapporteurs, while tasked by the UN to examine and advise on specific situations, are independent of it.

Genocide is a specific legal term, and her report suggests some of the legal criteria have been fulfilled.

She cites what she says appears to be Israel’s intention to destroy Palestinians as a group “in whole or in part”, a key clause in the Convention against Genocide.

She mentions in particular three elements which point to possible genocide; killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

The death toll in Gaza, currently is well over 32,000 according to Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, the bombing of densely populated areas, and the restrictions on aid supplies which, the UN says, have brought Gaza to the brink of famine are all proof, the report claims, of intent to destroy the group.