UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese condemned countries complicit in Israel’s genocide in the Gaza Strip and called for a new multilateralism to prevent future genocide.
Mr. Albanese presented a new report, “Gaza Genocide: A Mass Crime,” to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday and addressed remotely to representatives of the Desmond Leah Tutu Heritage Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa.
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She said Israel left Gaza “strangled, starved and crushed.” Her report, which examines the role of 63 countries in Israel’s actions in both Gaza and the West Bank, points to “decades of moral and political failure” by the multilateral system in a colonial world order sustained by a system of global collusion.
“Through illegal acts and willful omissions, too many states have undermined, created, and sheltered Israel’s militarized apartheid, allowing the settler colonial enterprise to metastasize into the ultimate crime against the indigenous peoples of Palestine: genocide,” she said.
He said the genocide was made possible by diplomatic protection in “international forums for the preservation of peace,” military ties ranging from arms sales to joint training that “feeded the machine of genocide,” the relentless weaponization of aid, and trade with groups like the European Union, which continues to do business with Israel despite sanctions on Russia over Ukraine.
The 24-page report analyzes how “livestreamed atrocities” were facilitated by third countries and focuses on how the United States provided Israel with “diplomatic protection” and controlled ceasefire negotiations by vetoing it seven times at the UN Security Council. Other Western countries also joined forces with abstentions, postponements and watered-down draft resolutions, reinforcing “the simple rhetoric of ‘balance'”, the report said.
The report said many countries continued to supply weapons to Israel “despite mounting evidence of genocide.” The report points out the hypocrisy of the US Congress passing a $26.4 billion package to defend Israel just as Israel was threatening to invade Rafah, calling it a “red line” for former US President Joe Biden’s administration.
The report also takes aim at Germany, which is the second-largest arms exporter to Israel during the genocide, supplying it with “everything from frigates to torpedoes,” and Britain, which is said to have flown more than 600 surveillance missions over Gaza since the war broke out in October 2023.
While acknowledging the “complexity of regional geopolitics,” the report highlighted the collusion of Arab and Islamic countries through the US-brokered normalization agreement with Israel.
The report notes that intermediary Egypt maintained “important security and economic ties with Israel during the war, including energy cooperation and the closure of the Rafah crossing.”
Ms Albanese said UNGA should have stood up to the “dangerous precedent” of sanctions imposed on her by the US earlier this year over her criticism of Israel’s actions in Palestine, which prevented her from traveling directly to New York.
“These measures amount to an attack on the United Nations itself, its independence, its integrity and its very soul. If left unchallenged, these sanctions will drive another nail into the coffin of the multilateral system,” she said.
The Gaza massacre “exposed an unprecedented rift between people and governments and betrayed the trust upon which peace and security in the world rests,” the report said.
Speaking at the UN General Assembly, the Special Rapporteur called for a new form of multilateralism, “not a sham, a living framework of rights and dignity for the many, not the few.”
She said actions taken in the past against South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Portugal and other rogue states showed that “international law can be enforced to ensure justice and self-determination”.
