CAPE TOWN - Israel's genocide in Gaza is part of an international system of complicity, a UN expert warned today.
"International law is clear: States must neither aid nor assist in the internationally wrongful acts of others, and must prevent and punish international crimes," Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 told the General Assembly. "This requires immediately suspending all military, economic, and diplomatic ties with Israel until its crimes cease, and pursuing justice for the survivors by holding perpetrators and accomplices accountable."
Albanese addressed the General Assembly from Cape Town, South Africa - after US sanctions prevented her from presenting her report in New York.
The Special Rapporteur's new report, "Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime," reveals how influential Third States - with the acquiescence of many others - have provided diplomatic, military, economic and ideological support to Israel, entrenching, rather than dismantling Israel's settler colonial apartheid, now turned genocidal.
"No State can credibly claim to uphold international law while arming, supporting, or shielding a genocidal regime," Albanese said.
The report shows how Third States are breaching their duty to prevent genocide, apartheid, and territorial conquest by supplying Israel with aid, arms, and political cover despite clear evidence of genocidal intent. Citing rulings from the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, Albanese said that the world has been on notice since at least 2004 - yet impunity has only deepened.
"States knew. States had the means to act," the Special Rapporteur said. "International law does not allow the luxury of feigned ignorance, delay or rhetorical acrobatics."
Instead, the report claims, States have obscured, ignored, and even profited from Israel's violations of international law, through military, economic, diplomatic and even "humanitarian" channels.
Albanese's report showed how military cooperation-through arms trade and intelligence sharing-has fuelled Israel's war machine including during the genocide. While the US and Germany alone have provided over 90 per cent of Israel's arms imports, at least 26 States have supplied or facilitated arms and components, and many others bought weapons tested on Palestinians.
"Trade and investment have sustained-and profited from-Israel's economy," the Special Rapporteur said. Between 2022 and 2024, exports of electronics, pharmaceuticals, energy, minerals, and dual-use items, totalling $474 billion, helped Israel finance its military operations. About one-third of this trade is with the EU, while North America and several Arab States continue deepening economic ties. Only a handful of States have marginally reduced trade during the genocide, as indirect commercial flows persist largely undisturbed.
"One of the most sadistic aspects I have witnessed," the Special Rapporteur said", "is the weaponisation of aid."
"What began with the blockade and attacks on UNRWA has become the full subjugation of aid to Israeli and US diktats, stripping the UN of its protective role," she said. "These measures, aided or endorsed by some States, deliberately worsened Gaza's living conditions."
"The problem is also deeply ideological," Albanese said. "Western leaders have echoed Israel's propaganda - repeating the 'self-defence' mantra, reviving colonial tropes that cast Palestinians as less than human. By framing Gaza's destruction as a battle of civilisation against barbarism, they have helped Israel erase the distinction between civilians and combatants, and with it, Palestinian rights and humanity."
"I am also surprised by how little too many in the Global Majority - including across the African continent, once liberated from colonial oppression - have done to confront this genocide," the Special Rapporteur said. While most Western governments have denied the genocide and shielded Israel through vetoes and diluted resolutions, only 14 States have joined South Africa's landmark case before the ICJ, and the Hague Group - the main diplomatic forum seeking to end the genocide - counts merely 13 members.
"This is not only about Palestine," Albanese said. "It is about the survival of the United Nations according to its core values and norms. From the ruins of oppression, a new multilateralism must emerge: not a façade, but a living architecture of rights and dignity for the many, not the few."
