United Nations Special Rapporteur for Palestinians Speaks at Gaza Conference With Leaders of Palestinian Terrorist Groups

 Israeli media is report­ing that on Novem­ber 28, 2022, Ital­ian lawyer Francesca Albanese, the Unit­ed Nations Spe­cial Rap­por­teur on the Sit­u­a­tion of Human Rights in the Pales­tin­ian Ter­ri­to­ries, par­tic­i­pat­ed in a Gaza con­fer­ence with sev­er­al lead­ers of Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ist groups. Accord­ing to an arti­cle by the Jerusalem Post, Albanese used the occa­sion to express her sup­port for Pales­tin­ian “resis­tance” to Israeli occupation:

Decem­ber 4, 2022 Albanese addressed a Hamas con­fer­ence in Gaza last Mon­day, in which she said, “You have a right to resist this occu­pa­tion.… Israel says ‘resis­tance equals ter­ror­ism,’ but an occu­pa­tion requires vio­lence and gen­er­ates violence.”

Read the rest here.

The event, titled “16 Years of Siege on Gaza: Impacts and Prospects,” aimed to “shed light on the reper­cus­sions of the siege on Gaza” and was orga­nized by the Coun­cil on Inter­na­tion­al Rela­tions-Pales­tine, a Pales­tine advo­ca­cy group chaired by for­mer Hamas Youth and Sports Min­is­ter Basem Naim. Par­tic­i­pants includ­ed Naim and sev­er­al oth­er lead­ing mem­bers of Pales­tin­ian ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions, including:

• Ghazi Hamad, for­mer Hamas Deputy For­eign Minister
• Abd al-Latif al-Qanou, Hamas spokesper­son
• Ahmad al-Mudal­lal, Pales­tin­ian Islam­ic Jihad (PIJ) leader
• Khadr Habib, PIJ leader in Gaza

At the con­fer­ence, Hamas spokesper­son Abd al-Latif al-Qanou said that the block­ade imposed on the Gaza Strip was a “crime against human­i­ty against the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple” and a “dis­grace” to the inter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, which he accused of adopt­ing dou­ble stan­dards in glob­al issues.

Accord­ing to addi­tion­al report­ing by the Jerusalem Post, Albanese’s remarks at the con­fer­ence led the Israeli gov­ern­ment to ban her from enter­ing and trav­el­ing through the West Bank, as Israel has done for her pre­de­ces­sors, Michael Lynk and Richard Falk. Pales­tin­ian media have crit­i­cized the ban.

From the incep­tion of her appoint­ment as UN Spe­cial Rap­por­teur, Israel has argued that Albanese is unfit to serve in the role by virtue of her pre-exist­ing views on the con­flict with the Pales­tini­ans. Accord­ing to an April 2012 Israeli media report:

Israel on Fri­day for­mal­ly sound­ed its objec­tion to the recent appoint­ment of an Ital­ian lawyer to head the UN Human Rights Council’s open-end­ed inves­ti­ga­tion into Israel’s treat­ment of Pales­tini­ans, argu­ing that she har­bors sig­nif­i­cant bias against the Jew­ish state. Mer­av Marks, legal advis­er for the Israeli mis­sion to the UN in Gene­va, said dur­ing the clos­ing ses­sion of the Human Rights Coun­cil that Francesca Albanese was “unfit” to take the role of Spe­cial Rap­por­teur on Pales­tine. “The new­ly appoint­ed spe­cial rapporteur’s opin­ion expressed in numer­ous arti­cles, events and media out­lets end­less­ly voic­ing anti-Israel libel show that she is unfit to take up this role,” said Marks. “In fact, the spe­cial rap­por­teur has even expressed con­cerns about her own per­son­al views, which she said could com­pro­mise her objec­tiv­i­ty when address­ing the sit­u­a­tion,” she said, adding that Israel there­fore object­ed “in the strongest terms” to the appoint­ment of Albanese to the “already one-sided man­date ded­i­cat­ed to dele­git­imiz­ing and demo­niz­ing Israel.”

Read the rest here.

In 2015, Albanese, whose hus­band served as an eco­nom­ic advi­sor to the Min­istry of Nation­al Econ­o­my of the State of Pales­tine in Ramal­lah,  shared a post cel­e­brat­ing Pop­u­lar Front for the Lib­er­a­tion of Pales­tine (PFLP) leader Leila Khaled as a “resis­tance icon,” writ­ing “Go Leila go!” Khaled was known for her role in a series of plane hijack­ings dur­ing 1969 and 1970. The PFLP has been a US-des­ig­nat­ed ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion since 1997.

In a 2015 Face­book post, Albanese used a con­text­less pho­to to equate the Nazi treat­ment of Jews with the treat­ment of Pales­tini­ans at the hands of Israeli soldiers.

More recent­ly, Albanese con­tro­ver­sial­ly used the Nazi Holo­caust to high­light the plight of the Pales­tini­ans under Israeli occu­pa­tion, say­ing in a video trans­lat­ed by a human rights NGO:

Just as trag­ic, ter­ri­ble, unspeak­able, is the tragedy that befell the Jew­ish peo­ple in the [Holo­caust], so for the Pales­tini­ans, the Nak­ba rep­re­sents the crum­bling of the con­nec­tive tis­sue of a people.

The “Nak­ba” is an Ara­bic term for the expul­sion of Arab Pales­tini­ans from the for­mer British Man­date of Pales­tine after 1947.

In an Octo­ber 2022 UN report, Albanese strong­ly con­demned Israel’s “apartheid prac­tices” in the occu­pied Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries, say­ing its actions against Pales­tini­ans amount­ed to persecution.

In May 2022, the Glob­al Influ­ence Oper­a­tions Report (GIOR) report­ed that Albanese’s pre­de­ces­sor Michael Lynk had par­tic­i­pat­ed in a vir­tu­al speak­ing event host­ed by the Pales­tin­ian Return Cen­tre, a UK-based Pales­tine advo­ca­cy group close to Hamas and the Glob­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (GMB).

The Hamas char­ter says it is “one of the wings of the Mus­lim Broth­ers in Pales­tine,” and a Hamas jour­nal­ist has acknowl­edged the role that the “inter­na­tion­al Mus­lim Broth­er­hood” has played in pro­vid­ing funds for the pur­chase of weapons. Hamas is known to be sup­port­ed finan­cial­ly and polit­i­cal­ly by the GMB.