The UN’s top independent expert on Palestinian human rights has repeated a call for Israel to be removed from its membership in the United Nations, citing its “relentless attacks” against the institution’s top aid group for Palestinian refugees.
On Thursday, UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese said on social media that Israel should be unseated, echoing calls from numerous international law experts and advocates for Palestinian rights.
Albanese has previously said that there are many reasons Israel should have its UN credential revoked. But just “the unparalleled/relentless attacks against the UN this year, in Gaza alone” merit suspension, she said, referring specifically to Israel’s treatment of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA).
These attacks include “damaging 70 percent of UNRWA premises, killing 240+ UN staff, arbitrarily arresting and often torturing countless of UNRWA staff and beneficiaries, hampering/destroying humanitarian aid, killing and maiming [forcibly displaced people] in UN shelters, defaming UNRWA and even outlawing it through Knesset vote, preventing access to UN investigators, etc.,” Albanese pointed out.
The special rapporteur’s post came in response to a statement by UNRWA saying that Israel has “stepped up its disinformation campaign” against the crucial human rights agency, buying ad space online and putting up billboards in cities across the world to attack the group.
“These ads are the latest in a series of a wider campaign against UNRWA by the Government of Israel, which continues to publicly call for dismantling the Agency. This latest global effort by a UN member state to label a UN agency as a terror organisation may amount to hate speech using corporations that are supposed to promote commercial products,” the group said.
Israel has long aimed to dismantle UNRWA, which provides services like education, health care and shelter to Palestinians in multiple countries and territories. Israeli officials have escalated attacks on the agency in the past year amid Israel’s genocide in Gaza, where the group serves as the crucial linchpin holding together the humanitarian aid operations that Israel has nearly totally destroyed.
The Israeli military and top Israeli officials have attacked the agency from all angles. In October, the Israeli Knesset passed a set of bills that ban UNRWA from operating in the occupied Palestinian territories and label UNRWA as a “terror” group, without any evidence.
Meanwhile, Israeli forces have killed 251 UNRWA staff in Gaza since October 2023; their targeting of UNRWA and other aid workers in Gaza has played a major role in 2024 being declared, as of November, the deadliest year on record for humanitarian workers.
Albanese and other experts have previously called for Israel to lose its UN membership as a consequence of its genocide and illegal occupation of Palestine, similarly to how apartheid South Africa was suspended from the UN General Assembly in the 1970s. Commentators have said that suspending Israel from the UN may be one of the only feasible avenues for the UN to slow or stop the genocide and make it harder for Israel to continue its settler colonialist project in the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, where its actions have been determined to be illegal by the International Court of Justice.
Officials from Israel and the U.S. have attacked numerous UN entities amid the genocide in Gaza, including such extremist moves as making threats of retaliation against the International Criminal Court and the court members’ families due to its issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli officials. These attacks, particularly those by top U.S. officials, threaten the existence of international law, experts have said, while UN Secretary-General António Guterres has warned that Israel’s genocide has pushed the world into a global “age of impunity.”
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