UN Expert Defiant Amid Threats After Israel 'Genocide' Finding

A UN expert who determined that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza said Wednesday she had faced threats over her work but stressed this only made her more determined to push ahead.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the rights situation in the Palestinian territories, said this week there were reasonable grounds to believe Israel was "committing the crime of genocide against the Palestinians as a group in Gaza".

Israel, which has long been highly critical of Albanese, denounced her report as an "obscene inversion of reality", while pro-Israeli groups called for her to step down.

Asked about the blowback at a news conference in Geneva, she acknowledged that "it has been a difficult time".

The independent expert, who was appointed by the UN Human Rights Council in 2022 but who does not speak on behalf of the United Nations, said she had "been attacked since the very beginning of my mandate".

"I do receive threats," she acknowledged, adding though that she had received "nothing that so far I have considered needing extra precautions."

The pressure, she said, "pisses me off, of course it does. But it ... creates even more pressure not to step back."

Albanese has also received support from a long line of mainly Arab and Muslim countries, since releasing her report.

She said that when she one day does decide to leave her post, it would not be because of her critics.

"It won't be because they vilify or they mistreat me in the public discourse".

Israel last month announced a visa ban on Albanese over comments denying that Hamas's October 7 attack was "anti-Semitic".

It said that her report was "simply an extension of a campaign seeking to undermine the very establishment of the Jewish State".

"I do not question the existence of the State of Israel," Albanese insisted Wednesday, adding though that she was "part of a movement which wants the end of the apartheid" and for Israel to behave "in accordance with international law".

She stressed that she "of course" condemned Hamas and its brutal attack on Israel, which sparked the deadly war raging in Gaza, but added: "nothing justifies what Israel is doing".

The October 7 attack resulted in about 1,160 deaths in Israel, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.

Israel's retaliatory campaign has killed at least 32,490 people in Gaza, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry, and has spurred a humanitarian catastrophe and UN warnings of a looming famine.