ROME. Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights violations committed in the occupied Palestinian territories, is the first woman ever to hold that position. “I intend to use my position to give space, outside of institutional settings, to those who fight for the respect of rights in that region, be they Palestinians or Israelis,” she declared in an interview on the day of her appointment. She knows Middle Eastern history, she studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, she has lived in Palestine.
«For two years Israel has denied me from doing my job as requested by the UN by not facilitating my entry into the occupied Palestinian territories – he denounces -. And he has been doing this for 17 years towards all the special rapporteurs who have held this mandate.” Israel's decision after his statements, defined as “outrageous”, according to which the October 7 attack “was a reaction to Israeli oppression”.
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His UN role involves observing what is happening in occupied Palestine, always with a view to monitoring respect for human rights. Which inevitably translates into visits and reports of what has been observed. And it is on the basis of what has been observed that every year Francesca Albanese is called to present a report to the Human Rights Council and one to the United Nations General Assembly.
Albanese was among those who spoke specifically about “war crimes” in the international situation.
“The outrageous “in quotation marks” statements consist in the fact that I responded to what the French president said was the largest anti-Semitic attack since the Second World War,” he clarifies regarding the ban imposed by Israel. He claims to have “condemned Hamas' crimes against Israeli civilians from the first moment.” But, the UN rapporteur underlines, «I firmly dispute that the origin/main cause of the crimes committed against Israeli civilians is anti-Semitism: exactly the statement that Israel considers “outrageous”».
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Albanese speaks of “very serious and dangerous semantic manipulation” by Israel, which “thus wants to divert attention” from what is happening in Gaza. “But in this way – he comments – it also diverts attention from the seriousness of the crimes that Hamas has committed.”
Until the day of her nomination, Albanese maintained that «Israel must withdraw its troops from the territories it has occupied illegally since at least 1967 and lift the siege of Gaza, which is not justified». The oppression of a people, she said, “cannot be considered self-defense.”
The rapporteur asks that Israel, «as a member of the United Nations, conforms to the values of the organization, respects international law and conducts its action as an occupying power, as long as the occupation lasts, in compliance with humanitarian law». But she denounces that, as the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, said, we must “recognize that the Hamas attacks did not happen 'out of nowhere'”. The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating oppression, the Palestinians have seen their land slowly devoured by settlements and plagued by violence, their economy suffocated, their people displaced and their homes demolished, their hopes for a solution politics to their situation have vanished.” She concludes: «The complaints of the Palestinian people cannot justify the atrocious attacks by Hamas. And those atrocious attacks cannot justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people.”
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