UN expert says world has given Israel ‘licence to torture Palestinians’ 

A United Nations expert says the world has given Israel a licence to torture Palestinians, with life in the occupied Palestinian territory “a continuum of physical and mental suffering”.

Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the rights situation in Palestinian territory occupied since 1967, said on Monday that “torture has effectively become state policy” in Israel.

“Israel has effectively been given a licence to torture Palestinians, because most of your governments, your ministers, have allowed it,” she said, as she presented her latest report to the UN Human Rights Council.

“What once operated in the shadows is now practiced openly: a regime of organised humiliation, pain and degradation, sanctioned at the highest political levels,” Albanese said in the report, titled “Torture and genocide”.

“Torture is not confined to cells and interrogation rooms,” the report outlined.

“Through the cumulative impact of mass displacement, siege, denial of aid and food, unrestrained military and settler violence, and pervasive surveillance and terror, the occupied Palestinian territory has become a space of collective punishment, where the destruction of the conditions of life turns genocidal violence into a tool of collective torture with long-term mental and physical consequences for the occupied population,” it added.

Albanese, an outspoken critic of Israeli action in the occupied West Bank and its genocidal war on Gaza, has faced backlash from Israel and the United States, with mounting calls for her removal from the position of special rapporteur.

Since October 7, 2023, Israeli attacks on Gaza have killed at least 72,263 people and injured 171,944 others, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

In the occupied West Bank, since October 2023, Israeli authorities arrested more than 18,500 Palestinians, including at least 1,500 children as of February, the report found.

Israel’s mission to the UN slammed Albanese’s report and called her an “agent of chaos”.

“Albanese abuses her UN platform to engage in virulent antisemitism, including peddling narratives that constitute Holocaust distortion and trivialisation. She routinely makes statements supporting terrorist organisations and advocates dangerous extremist narratives to undermine the very existence of the State of Israel,” the mission said in a statement.

Albanese called on UN member states to “prevent and punish” acts of torture and genocide, and uphold international law.

“Its increasing use as part of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people makes this violation all the more grave and indefensible,” she said, according to a UN press release.

“If the international community continues to tolerate such acts when inflicted on Palestinians, then the law itself will be stripped of meaning.”