UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese delivered a report to the body’s Human Rights Council on Tuesday, saying that she believed that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza since Oct. 7 amounted to genocide and called on countries to impose sanctions and an arms embargo immediately.
“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, drawing on a highly controversial interpretation of Israeli history.
The UN special rapporteur writes 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 time 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.”
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 about 300 civilians at a music festival and the murder, rape, and burning of civilian families in border area communities. During the attack, Hamas and allied terrorist groups also kidnapped more than 240 people, 134 of whom the groups are still holding 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 12,000 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 says 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.” She says that her report does not examine those events because they are “beyond the geographic scope of her mandate.”
Tzvi Joffre and Reuters contributed to this report.
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