26-3-2024 (GENEVA) A United Nations human rights expert has delivered a blistering accusation against Israel, stating there are “reasonable grounds” to conclude the Jewish state committed acts of “genocide” during its military assault on Gaza last year. The official also warned of potential “ethnic cleansing” policies.
In a controversial report released Monday, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, claimed clear evidence existed that Israel violated three of the five acts constituting genocide under the UN Genocide Convention through its Gaza offensive.
“The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” Albanese stated in her report titled “Anatomy of a Genocide”, which was swiftly rejected by Israel as an “obscene inversion of reality”.
The independent expert, appointed by but not speaking for the UN, said she found justification “to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of…acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met”.
Those purported acts listed were “killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to the group’s members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
Israel’s diplomatic mission in Geneva firmly rebuked the “outrageous accusations”, asserting the country “utterly rejects the report” as merely “an extension of a campaign seeking to undermine the very establishment of the Jewish State”.
“Israel’s war is against Hamas, not against Palestinian civilians,” a statement read, echoing longstanding criticisms by the Jewish state of Albanese’s mandate which the US branded “biased”.
While “aware” of the report’s contents, a US official told AFP “we have no reason to believe Israel has committed acts of genocide in Gaza.”
Last month, Israel imposed a visa ban on Albanese after she disputed claims that Hamas’ October 7th rocket attack which sparked the Gaza war had been anti-Semitic. That strike killed around 1,160 Israelis, mainly civilians, with some 250 taken hostage.
Israel’s ensuing bombardment and ground incursion into Gaza has since claimed over 32,300 Palestinian lives by the territory’s health ministry counts, overwhelmingly women and children.
South Africa has already petitioned the International Court of Justice alleging Israel’s offensive breached the Genocide Convention, though no ruling on that accusation has been issued yet.
In her report to be presented to the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday, Albanese asserted Israel’s “genocidal acts” stemmed from “statements of genocidal intent” by some senior officials advocating forced displacement of Palestinians to make way for Israeli settlers – which she branded “ethnic cleansing”.
The report condemned Israel for treating all Palestinians and infrastructure as “terrorist” targets, meaning “no Palestinian in Gaza is safe by definition” and leading to “devastating, intentional effects, costing the lives of tens of thousands”.
It framed the Gaza assault as “an escalatory stage of a longstanding settler colonial process of erasure” against the Palestinian people ongoing well before last October’s hostilities erupted.
