‘First genocide to awaken the world’: UN rapporteur Albanese warns as Gaza destruction unfolds

The UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, has censured the situation in the occupied Palestinian territories as “apocalyptic,” saying it is the first genocide that has awakened global conscience.

Speaking at the closing panel of the Doha Forum 2025 in Qatar on Sunday, Albanese described the status quo in almost totally destroyed Gaza as a complete political breakdown of moral responsibility.

“This is not the first genocide in human history. This is at least the third genocide, if not the fourth or the fifth, that occurs in my lifetime,” she said.

“This is the first genocide that awakened global conscience and global response. Palestine is allowing us to see what the law becomes when it is in the hands of power,” she added.

According to Albanese, Palestine is allowing us to see what connects all injustices, what happens to Yemen, to Sudan, to Congo, and including in places where poverty has not been so rooted as it is today for a long time, including in the West.

“We have a common enemy, and we need to face it where politics is at the service of economic interests.”

She pointed out that the delayed UN ceasefire vote, coupled with Israel using the truce to carry on what the genocide left unfinished, demonstrates how international systems have been eroded by power and impunity.

Gaza, the UN expert noted, has exposed Western hypocrisy and laid bare a profound dishonesty at the heart of the global order.

“Palestine has also sparked a global awakening, driven by youth, workers, and civil servants who mobilized across the former settler colonial states, US, in Europe, and beyond,” Albanese noted.

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Hamas has said it will surrender its weapons to an independent

She spoke out against the unprecedented US sanctions enforced against her, condemning them as unlawful and inconsistent with the UN Charter.

On 30 June, Albanese wrote a report naming over 60 companies, including major US technology firms such as Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, which she said were involved in “the transformation of Israel’s economy of occupation to an economy of genocide.”

The Italian lawyer’s report was cited by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio as a key reason for her sanctioning by the US.

“What I am left with is my dignity and my voice,” the senior UN official said. “I will not be silenced while I still have breath in my lungs.”

Albanese urged immediate international action in the face of ongoing Israeli acts of aggression.

“The International Court of Justice has already made the legal path clear: Israel must end the occupation, withdraw its forces, dismantle settlements, and stop exploiting Palestinian resources. Justice demands nothing less,” she noted.

Since October 2023, the Israeli army has killed over 70,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children, and injured more than 171,000 others in a two-year war in Gaza that has reduced much of the coastal sliver to rubble.

The onslaught has also led to the widespread destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure, creating a dire situation for the territory’s surviving inhabitants.

Despite a ceasefire that began on October 10, Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza continues unabated, with some 600 violations of the ceasefire in the last seven weeks.

Israel has killed at least 360 Palestinians since the ceasefire went into effect, according to Gaza authorities. Among the dead are at least 70 children, UNICEF has reported.

International bodies, including the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, and other rights groups, have concluded that the Israeli offensive in Gaza amounts to genocide.

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