Special rapporteur report ‘brings shame’ to UN Human Rights Council, Israel says

The Israeli mission to the United Nations in Geneva lambasted a U.N. official over the report “Anatomy of a Genocide,” which accuses Israel of carrying out crimes against humanity in its war against Hamas in Gaza.

“The very attempt to level the charge of genocide against Israel is an outrageous distortion of the Genocide Convention,” the Israeli mission stated.

“It is an attempt to empty the word ‘genocide’ of its unique force and special meaning and turn the convention itself into a tool of terrorists, who have total disdain for life and for the law, against those trying to defend against them,” it added.

Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the Palestinian-controlled territories, has a checkered history, including antisemitic statements. She regularly lays blame at Israel’s feet for problems in the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Albanese presented her report, which accuses Israel of committing genocide as an “inherent part” of its founding and continued existence, to the U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday.

The special rapporteur’s report “brings shame to the Human Rights Council,” the Israeli mission stated. “It is clear by her previous statements, before and after the OCt. 7 massacre that, under the guise of the U.N., the special rapporteur continues her campaign of delegitimizing the very creation and existence of the state of Israel.”

The report focuses mainly on Israel’s counterterror operation against Hamas after the latter’s Oct. 7 massacre.

“Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a longstanding settler-colonial process of erasure,” Albanese wrote in the report.

“The ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all,” Albanese added. She used the word for “catastrophe” that Palestinians use for the events leading up to the creation of the modern-day State of Israel in 1948.

The report “began with the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide, and then tried to prove her distorted and politically-driven views with weak arguments and justifications,” the Israeli mission in Geneva stated.

The report does not examine Hamas’s regular attacks on Israel since the terror organization seized power in Gaza in 2007, including the Oct. 7 massacre.

“The special rapporteur firmly condemns the crimes committed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in Israel on Oct. 7 and urges accountability and the release of hostages,” per the report. “This report does not examine those events, as they are beyond the geographic scope of her mandate. Nor does it examine the situation in the West Bank, including east Jerusalem.”

Albanese claimed on Feb. 10 that the Oct. 7 victims “were not killed because of their Judaism but in response to Israel’s oppression.”

The U.N. official has long demonized Israel, blaming it for the terrorism it faces and criticizing Israel’s very existence.

“Before Oct. 7, the special rapporteur accused the Jewish lobby of subjugating America; dismissed Israeli security concerns as paranoia; talked of ‘Israel’s greed’; compared Israel’s actions of that to the Nazis and legitimized terrorist actions by Hamas and other terrorist organizations,” the Israeli mission in Geneva stated.

“Since the war, she has continued this campaign unabated, excusing and legitimizing the attacks of Oct. 7, dismissing their antisemitic nature and dismissing any concrete evidence of acts of savagery that were perpetrated on that day,” it added.