report of Special Rapporteur on Palestine Francesca Albanese titled “Torture and Genocide.”
By Dina Rovner, Legal Advisor at UN Watch
The report released today by Francesca Albanese frames Israel’s alleged torture of Palestinians as “a structural feature of the ongoing Israeli genocide and broader settler-colonial apartheid” (para. 1). Throughout, she employs expansive and imprecise language to broaden the definition of torture, alleging “collective torture” (paras. 70, 86), a “torturous environment” (paras. 6, 15), and abuse occurring “across time and space” (para. 8).
Despite offering no new evidence of genocidal intent-an essential element of the crime-Albanese asserts that such intent is “apparent” when “torture is perpetrated across an entire territory… and sustained through policies that destroy the conditions of life” (para. 82), relying on previously debunked statements by Israeli officials. The report omits the context of an ongoing armed conflict with Hamas, sustained jihadist terrorism against Israeli civilians, and Israel’s efforts to mitigate harm-all of which contradict its central claims of intentional torture and genocide.
The result is a complete inversion: Hamas’s openly declared genocidal intent and mass atrocities are recast as crimes committed by Israel. While the Hamas Charter is openly genocidal against Israel, Albanese attributes such intent to Israel. Hamas acted on this intent in its October 7 attack targeting Israeli civilians. Moreover, the very crimes the report imputes to Israel-“mass killings, mass displacement, mass destruction of homes and infrastructure, mass starvation, [and] mass deprivation… of essential medical care”-were carried out by Hamas against Israeli civilians on October 7 and against hostages in Gaza thereafter.
Below are specific critiques of the report.
1. Expanding Definition of Torture into a “Torturous Environment” Across an Entire Territory
Albanese’s report relies on a non-mainstream legal theory that radically expands the definition of torture beyond existing international law.
Under Article 1 of the Convention Against Torture, torture is a narrowly defined crime requiring: (1) an intentional act; (2) the infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering; (3) for a specific prohibited purpose such as punishment, coercion, intimidation, or discrimination; and (4) involvement of a public official. The Rome Statute similarly defines torture as the intentional infliction of severe pain or suffering upon a person in custody or under the control of the accused-a definition grounded in identifiable victims and specific conduct.
Albanese abandons this framework. She accuses Israel of creating a “torturous environment” (paras. 6; 47; 71; 85) affecting an entire population across an entire territory. The only authority cited for this sweeping claim is a prior UN report (para. 15) that used the concept in a fundamentally different context-describing cumulative methods of torture inflicted upon a specific individual. Albanese extends that concept beyond “classic situations of detention” to the West Bank and Gaza Strip as a whole, without citing any legal authority supporting such an expansion.
The consequences of this move are significant. The acts she labels as collective “torture”-including starvation as a method of war or genocide-are already separately defined crimes under international law. Rebranding them as “torture” adds nothing legally and instead collapses distinct legal categories. If every war crime or crime against humanity can also be relabeled as torture, the specific legal elements of torture are rendered meaningless.
Torture requires the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering for a prohibited purpose. By redefining the general hardships of armed conflict as “torture,” Albanese collapses this requirement. Armed conflict inevitably causes suffering, but military operations are undertaken to achieve military objectives-not to inflict pain as an end in itself. Erasing that distinction transforms torture from a defined criminal offense into a catch-all label for the consequences of war.
Albanese’s expansion does not stop at territory. She accuses Israel of torturing Palestinians “across time and space” (paras. 8, 13) and describes “collective torture against Palestinians as a group” (para. 70). She goes further, asserting that “genocide has become the ultimate form of torture,” characterizing it as “continuous, generational and collective” (para. 86).
Effectively, she transforms a precise criminal definition into a metaphor for political grievance. By recasting torture as a diffuse “environment” operating across “time and space,” the report substitutes legal analysis with moral narrative.
2. Omission of Hamas Torture of Israeli Hostages
This report by the Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967” omits any discussion of Hamas torture and abuse of Israeli hostages held in those territories. Returned hostages have testified to being confined in cramped underground tunnels without natural light or fresh air, subjected to unsanitary conditions, deprived of food and hygiene, chained, denied medical treatment, beaten, sexually assaulted, and subjected to psychological abuse.
A report devoted to torture that fails to address the captivity, abuse, and documented mistreatment of Israeli hostages demonstrates selective scrutiny. Such an omission does not reflect a principled application of international law, but an advocacy-driven approach.
3. Characterization of Israel as a Racist “Settler-Colonial-Apartheid” Regime
Albanese frames the conflict as a settler-colonial and racial conflict. She describes torture as “a structural feature of the ongoing Israeli genocide and broader settler-colonial apartheid” (para. 1), accuses Israel of “settler-colonial genocide” (Paras. 7; 82), and characterizes it as a “colonial and racially ordered regime” (para. 19). This framing denies the indigeneity of the Jewish people, who have maintained a continuous presence in the land of Israel for millennia and for whom the land is central to their religion, history, and collective identity. Instead, it casts Jews as colonial outsiders in their historic homeland.
By presenting Israel as a foreign colonial implant devoid of legitimate national or historical claims, the report effectively denies Jewish collective self-determination and treats the existence of the Jewish state as inherently unlawful.
4. Erasure of Hamas Terrorism and Armed Conflict Context
The report completely ignores the existence of an ongoing armed conflict between Israel and Hamas, as well as sustained jihadist terrorism against Israeli civilians by Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and other groups. By erasing the reality of armed conflict, the report portrays the ordinary and foreseeable consequences of warfare-civilian displacement, destruction of infrastructure, and civilian casualties-as evidence of genocidal intent.
The report likewise omits Hamas’s war crimes and violations of the laws of armed conflict, including its systematic use of human shields, its extensive network of subterranean terror tunnels embedded under civilian areas throughout Gaza, and hoarding and profiteering from humanitarian aid. As a result, it attributes civilian harm solely to Israel, effectively absolving Hamas of responsibility for its own war crimes.
This omission is reflected throughout Albanese’s treatment of Israeli military operations. She levels a series of one-sided accusations against Israel while withholding critical context and ignoring Hamas’s role in increasing harm to Palestinian civilians. For example, she accuses Israel of “cartographic terror” in Gaza (para. 52), referring to evacuation warnings advising civilians to leave active battle zones, yet ignores Hamas’s militarization of civilian areas that makes such evacuations necessary to reduce civilian harm. She criticizes Israeli strikes in designated humanitarian zones while disregarding Hamas militant activity in those same areas (para. 52).
She blames Israel for “having obliterated” the homes of “over a million” Palestinians, as families’ “heirlooms and intimate connections with their past are lost” (para. 53). Yet she again ignores Hamas’s systematic militarization of residential areas, including the construction of a vast terror-tunnel infrastructure beneath homes, tunnel entrances inside residences, military operations conducted from civilian dwellings, and the booby-trapping of houses to maximize casualties among Israeli troops. She similarly blames Israel for damage to “schools, mosques, libraries, museums and cultural sites” (para. 54), while ignoring Hamas’s use of such sites for military purposes.
Likewise, she accuses Israel of “medicide” (para. 56), while disregarding evidence that Hamas has operated from hospitals and used ambulances for cover. At the same time, she fails to acknowledge humanitarian measures facilitated by Israel to alleviate pressure on Gaza’s health sector, including field hospitals, medical evacuations, and polio vaccination efforts.
This deliberate and one-sided treatment of the evidence violates the evidentiary standards governing Special Procedures and renders the report fundamentally unreliable.
More troubling still, the systematic erasure of Hamas crimes and the realities of armed conflict-combined with the ideological framing of Israel as a “settler-colonial regime”-provides the pretext for Albanese to level accusations of the gravest international crimes while bypassing core legal requirements such as intent, proportionality, and military necessity. In doing so, the report misrepresents both the factual record and the governing law, in violation of the duty of objectivity and integrity required of a UN mandate-holder.
5. Dismissal of Israeli “Security” as Illegitimate
Albanese places the terms “security” and “security threats” in quotation marks (paras. 3; 23), signaling her dismissal of Israel’s legitimate security concerns while recasting its counterterrorism measures as racially motivated “torture” and “genocide.” Her reporting repeatedly denies Israel’s right to self-defense under international law. Yet the Hamas Charter calls for Israel’s elimination, its officials openly affirm that objective, and have vowed to repeat the October 7 attacks again and again. Like any state, Israel has the right under international law to defend its territory and citizens from armed attacks, including those carried out by Hamas. By rejecting Israel’s right to security and self-defense in order to justify accusations of torture and genocide, Albanese abandons the requirements of objectivity and independence and uses her mandate as a vehicle for political advocacy rather than impartial human rights reporting.
6. Dishonest Misquotations and Fabrication of Intent
As Albanese acknowledges, intent is a necessary element of torture. To support her claim that Israel’s conduct following October 7, 2023 demonstrates an intent to subject Palestinians to torture-rather than an intent to defeat Hamas-she takes President Herzog’s words out of context as purported evidence of Israel’s “destructive intent” and “collective vengeance” (para. 3). Albanese misrepresents Herzog as claiming that there are no “innocents” in Gaza, when in fact he said the exact opposite, explaining how carefully the IDF seeks to reduce harm to civilians and to separate Hamas from the civilian population through warnings, evacuations, and monitoring. When asked about the exact phrase Albanese quotes-that “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible”-Herzog made clear that he did not mean that Gaza’s civilians were legitimate military targets: “No, I didn’t say that, I did not say that, I want to make it clear.” He repeatedly emphasized, both in that press conference and elsewhere, that Israel was targeting Hamas and making every effort to distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters and to avoid civilian harm. Albanese’s decision to isolate a single line while ignoring the clear surrounding context amounts, in the words of international law expert Salo Aizenberg, to “knowingly misquoting a head of state” and constitutes “intellectual fraud.”
Albanese similarly misrepresents Netanyahu’s October 7, 2023 statement that Israel would turn areas where Hamas had entrenched itself into rubble, portraying it instead as an expression of Israel’s long-term military objective to reduce all of Gaza to “cities of ruins” (para. 53). The statement makes clear Netanyahu was referring to Hamas, not to Gaza as a whole.
Albanese also cites, without attribution, a statement by Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referring to Hamas as “human animals” (para. 51). She presents the remark as a “depiction of the entire population of Gaza as a group,” even though it plainly refers to Hamas and has been publicly clarified as such by Gallant himself. Fabricating intent through selective and distorted quotations is not merely intellectual dishonesty. It is a knowing abuse of her UN mandate that promotes unfounded and demonizing accusations against Israel.
7. False Claims of “Societal Torture” Through Starvation
Albanese’s report repeatedly accuses Israel of creating a “torturous environment” through intentional “starvation” (para. 47; 71). She claims that starvation constitutes “societal torture” and that it devastates “a people’s present and future” (para. 59). Yet the report omits facts that contradict this narrative, including Israel’s facilitation of over 2 million tons of aid into Gaza during the two years of war, more than 80% of which consisted of food and water, as well as documented Hamas theft and profiteering from humanitarian aid. The report also ignores the extremely low number of malnutrition deaths-most involving individuals with pre-existing medical conditions-far below levels that would be expected in a famine. The only individuals intentionally starved in Gaza during the war were the Israeli hostages held by Hamas-a fact omitted entirely from Albanese’s report.
8. Discussion of Child Detention Omits Armed Group Use of Minors
Albanese’s report criticizes the large number of children detained by Israeli authorities since October 7, 2023 (paras. 24-25). Yet, she omits Hamas and other armed groups’ widespread
use of minors in hostilities, including documented cases of teenagers used as fighters and in combat-support roles-an omission that fundamentally distorts the context in which minors may be detained. The recruitment and use of children in hostilities by armed groups is itself a serious violation of international law, including the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict to which the State of Palestine is a party.
9. False Claims of MSF “Expulsion” from Gaza
Albanese’s report cites what it describes as the “expulsion” of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) in February 2026 as evidence of Israeli “medicide” in Gaza (para. 56). In fact, Israel required humanitarian organizations to provide staff lists for vetting, citing security and transparency concerns after evidence emerged that Hamas had infiltrated humanitarian organizations in Gaza. MSF was not expelled. It chose not to comply with this requirement. Notably, on February 11, 2026, after announcing that it would not provide the names, MSF acknowledged that it had to suspend all non-essential services at Nasser Hospital due to Hamas activity there.
10. Reliance on Unidentified, One-Sided Sources
The report relies heavily on non-transparent and unverified sources, including unidentified submissions, unnamed witnesses, politicized NGO materials, and testimonies collected by third-party organizations, while largely disregarding contrary evidence (para. 2). Rather than independently testing allegations, it frequently reinforces its conclusions by citing prior reports by UN experts (footnotes 188; 240), Commission of Inquiry findings (footnotes 92; 169), or the Special Rapporteur’s own earlier reports (footnotes 136; 155; 238; 192; 247)-materials that themselves relied on similarly aligned sources. This produces not corroboration, but a closed evidentiary circuit in which allegations are recycled, amplified, and presented as established fact.
The Code of Conduct and Manual of Operations for Special Procedures require mandate-holders to be guided by discretion, transparency, impartiality, and even-handedness, and to rely on objective and dependable facts drawn from credible sources that have been duly cross-checked. By contrast, the approach here privileges aligned advocacy material over independent verification. It is incompatible with the standards of objectivity and due diligence required of UN Special Procedures.
11. Maximalist Remedies Against Israel
The report calls for maximalist remedies aimed at isolating Israel internationally, including criminal proceedings against Israelis worldwide under universal jurisdiction statutes, expanded mechanisms for collecting evidence of alleged Israeli crimes, and a full commercial boycott (para. 92). demands that Israel pay reparations to Palestinians (para. 89), effectively absolving them of responsibility for their own acts of terror and aggression. Albanese also calls on the International Criminal Court (ICC) to “immediately request arrest warrants” for “Israeli officials in particular Ben-Gvir, Katz and Smotrich”-accusing them of “perpetrating and/or ordering atrocity crimes”-as well as the IDF Chief of General Staff and senior Israeli Prison Service officials (para. 93). The breadth of these measures underscores the report’s punitive orientation and demonstrates that it functions as lawfare advocacy rather than an impartial expert assessment.
