A UN expert says the world has given Israel ‘licence to oppress Palestinians’. Israel-Palestine conflict news

UN special envoy Francesca Albanese says torture in Israel has ‘effectively become state policy’.

The world has given Israel licence to oppress Palestinians, with life in the occupied Palestinian territory a “continuum of physical and mental suffering”, a UN expert says.

Francesca Albanese, the UN special envoy on the situation of rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, said on Monday that “atrocities have effectively become state policy” in Israel.

“Israel has effectively been given a licence to oppress Palestinians because the majority of your governments and your ministers have allowed it,” he said in presenting his latest report to the UN Human Rights Council.

“What once operated in the shadows is now carried out 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 limited to cells and interrogation rooms,” the report said.

It says, “Because of mass displacement, blockades, lack of aid and food, unchecked violence from the military and settlers, and constant surveillance and fear, the occupied Palestinian territory has become a place of collective punishment, where the worsening living conditions turn genocidal violence into a form of mass torture that has long-lasting mental and physical effects on the people living there.”

Albanese, a vocal critic of Israeli actions in the occupied West Bank and its genocidal war on Gaza, has faced opposition from Israel and the United States, with calls growing for her to be removed from the special envoy post.

Israeli attacks on Gaza since October 7, 2023,

have killed at least 72,263 people and injured 171,944 others, according to Gaza’s health ministry.

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

Israel’s mission to the United Nations criticised Albanese’s report and called him an “agent of chaos”.

The mission said in a statement, “Albanis abuses her UN platform to engage in virulent anti-Semitism, including narratives that distort and trivialise the Holocaust. She regularly makes statements supporting terrorist organisations and advocates dangerous extremist narratives designed to undermine the existence of the State of Israel.”

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

According to a UN press release, he said, “Its escalating use as part of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people makes this violation all the more serious and inexcusable.”

“If the international community continues to tolerate such actions against Palestinians, the law will lose its meaning.”