In a powerful address to the UN’s Social, Humanitarian, and Cultural Committee (Third Committee), UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Palestine, Francesca Albanese, warned that the support provided by certain states for Israeli settlement expansion, forced displacement, and ongoing aggression has escalated from a political failure to full-fledged complicity in genocide against the Palestinian people.
Albanese, barred from attending in person due to US sanctions, asserted that the atrocities committed in Gaza since October 2023 are not isolated incidents but the culmination of decades of international complicity and moral failure. She described how financial and military support from major powers has enabled the transformation of Israeli colonial-settlement enterprise into a deliberate campaign of destruction targeting both people and infrastructure, now amounting to genocide.
According to Albanese, over two years of war on Gaza, more than 68,531 Palestinians have been killed and 170,402 wounded, with thousands still missing under the rubble or held in Israeli prisons. In the West Bank, 1,062 have been killed and around 10,000 injured, while over 20,000 have been detained, including 1,600 children.
These figures, she emphasised, reveal the widespread and systematic nature of crimes across all Palestinian territories, enabled by a deafening silence from the international community and total impunity.
Albanese underlined that many states are not merely passive observers but are actively enabling war crimes by arming the Israeli occupation, financing its military operations, and shielding it diplomatically in international forums. Such actions, under Article 25 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, constitute participation in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
She described the international order as inherently colonial in nature, treating Palestinians as less worthy of justice and protection. The current legal and diplomatic system, Albanese warned, is rife with double standards, invoking international law against the weak, while ignoring violations by politically or militarily allied perpetrators.
Albanese concluded that the situation in Palestine is not merely a political conflict but an unfolding international crime, with mounting evidence of systematic and intentional atrocities. She called for urgent moral and legal action to end impunity and hold perpetrators accountable before the occupation transforms permanently into a machinery of extermination.
Her intervention underscores the pressing need for a genuine international response to prevent further atrocities and reaffirm the principles of justice and international law.
