Israel Bans UN Rapporteur for Statement on Motive for Hamas Attack
Israel Bans UN Rapporteur for Statement on Motive for Hamas Attack
She said her banning "must not become a distraction from Israel's atrocities in Gaza"
Israel announced Monday that UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese is no longer allowed in the country after comments she made about the motivation behind Hamas’s 7 October attack.
Israel and its advocates in the Western media have tried to portray the attack that killed 1,200 as unprovoked and an example of why the Israelis need to keep their boots on the necks of Palestinians. But some have compared the attack as nothing short of a prison break.
“The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel’s oppression,” she said in an X post, according to The Times of Israel. Her comment was in response to France deciding to hold a ceremony honoring those killed in the Hamas attack.
Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied by Israel since 1967, continued, “The ‘greatest anti-Semitic massacre of our century’? No, Mr. Emmanuel Macron. The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel’s oppression. France & the international community did nothing to prevent it. My respects to the victims.”
In 2022, Albanese angered Israelis when she told the General Assembly that the Israeli military was guilty of pursuing the ‘de-Palestinianisation’ of the occupied territory.
Her report stated that Israeli occupation violates Palestinian territorial sovereignty by “seizing, annexing, fragmenting, and transferring its civilian population to the occupied territory.”