Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine, has taken aim at states complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, calling for a new multilateralism that will prevent it from happening again in future.
Albanese presented her new report – “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” – to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, addressing delegates remotely from the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa.
Israel had, she said, left Gaza “strangled, starved, shattered”. Her report, which examines the role of 63 states in Israel’s actions in both Gaza and the West Bank, calls out the multilateral system for “decades of moral and political failure” in a colonial world order sustained by a global system of complicity”.
“Through unlawful actions and deliberate omissions, too many states have harmed, founded and shielded Israel’s militarised apartheid, allowing its settler colonial enterprise to metastasise into genocide, the ultimate crime against the indigenous people of Palestine,” she said.
Genocide had been enabled, she said, through diplomatic protection in international “fora meant to preserve peace”, military ties ranging from weapons sales to joint trainings that “fed the genocidal machinery”, the unchallenged weaponisation of aid, and trade with entities like the European Union, which had sanctioned Russia over Ukraine yet continued doing business with Israel.
The 24-page report analyses how the “live-streamed atrocity” was facilitated by third states, zooming in on how the United States provided “diplomatic cover” for Israel, using its veto power at the UN Security Council seven times and controlling ceasefire negotiations. Other Western nations had collaborated, it said, with abstentions, delays and watered-down draft resolutions, reinforcing “a simplistic rhetoric of ‘balance’”.
Many states had, it said, continued supplying Israel with arms, “even as the evidence of genocide … mounted”. The report noted the hypocrisy of the US Congress passing a $26.4bn package for Israeli defence, just as Israel threatened the Rafah invasion – supposedly a “red line” for the administration of former US President Joe Biden.
The report also points a finger of blame at Germany, the second-largest arms exporter to Israel during the genocide, with supplies ranging from “frigates to torpedoes”, and the United Kingdom, which has allegedly flown more than 600 surveillance missions over Gaza since war broke out in October 2023.
While acknowledging the “complexity of regional geopolitics”, the report also highlighted the complicity of Arab and Muslim states through US-brokered normalisation deals with Israel.
It points out that mediator Egypt maintained “significant security and economic relations with Israel, including energy cooperation and the closing of the Rafah crossing” during the war.
Albanese said the UNGA should have confronted the “dangerous precedent” of sanctions imposed on her earlier this year by the United States over her criticism of Israel’s actions in Palestine, which had prevented her from travelling to New York in person.
“These measures constitute an assault on the UN itself, its independence, its integrity, its very soul. If left unchallenged, these sanctions will drive yet another nail into the coffin of the multilateral system,” she said.
The Gaza genocide “exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest”, said the report.
Speaking at the UNGA, the special rapporteur called for a new form of multilateralism, “not a facade, but a living framework of rights and dignity, not for the few … but for the many”.
Action taken in the past against South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Portugal and other rogue states had, she said, shown that “international law can be enforced to secure justice and self-determination”.
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