"The destruction of truth has become part of the destruction of a people", statement by Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, UN Palestine Committee Briefing on “Human Dignity Under Strain”

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“Human Dignity Under Strain: The Humanitarian and Human Rights Consequences in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”

Statement by Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967

29 October 2026

Mr. Chair, Excellencies, colleagues, friends,

Thank you, Ambassador Seck, and thank you to the Committee for convening this briefing.

I am glad to be joined by my fellow mandate holders and by the Chair of the Commission of Inquiry. I regret that I can only address you remotely. That a UN-appointed expert cannot enter the city where the United Nations sits, because of sanctions for doing her job, says something about the state of our system.

Earlier this week, I presented my report to the Third Committee. It is titled Truth under the rubble: media in the time of genocide. The report shows that the destruction of truth has become part of the destruction of a people. The destruction of a people that I have documented for more than three years, and that we should have seen coming, as Palestinians themselves did. But we did not believe them. Or perhaps we lacked the courage to believe what they were telling us.

Since October 2023, Israel has killed nearly 300 journalists and media workers in Gaza. Among them are camera operators struck in “double-tap” attacks, and reporters labelled “terrorists” after their deaths, on undisclosed or discredited evidence. Hundreds of their relatives have been killed. Media offices and most of Gaza’s telecommunications infrastructure have been destroyed, and foreign journalists have been barred from the territory for three years.

Inside Israel, segments of the media have normalised dehumanisation and, at times, explicitly called for Gaza’s annihilation. These calls continue despite a binding order of the International Court of Justice to prevent and punish incitement to genocide. Abroad, influential outlets and digital platforms have too often reproduced the perpetrator’s narrative. They have censored Palestinian voices, and in some cases they have taken money to deny a famine.

I call this “mediacide”. When witnesses are eliminated and evidence is erased, the crime is not only committed. It is concealed, and impunity becomes part of the plan.

Since October 2023, more than 74,500 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza and over 175,000 injured, according to the latest available figures. More than 21,000 of those killed were children. More than 58,000 children have lost one or both parents, and thousands of them have survived only to face a lifetime altered by injury. Gaza has the highest number of child amputees per capita in the world. More than 5,000 amputations have been recorded, around one in five involving a child, many carried out without anaesthesia. Many of the tens of thousands of survivors face permanent disabilities, while the destruction of healthcare and rehabilitation services denies them the care, prosthetics and support they urgently need.

I wish I could tell you the so-called ceasefire has brought relief. It has not. Since it was announced a year ago, more than 1,500 people have been killed, and Israeli attacks have continued on almost every single day.

This past week alone, children were killed, a university campus was struck twice, and tent camps were set ablaze. Bakeries are closing because flour is blocked. Hospital generators are running out of fuel. Families shelter in rainwater pits and buildings on the verge of collapse as winter approaches.

In the West Bank, the pattern of erasure is accelerating. After the attack at a Hebron checkpoint on 23 October, the Prime Minister of Israel vowed to destroy the attackers’ neighbourhood, “to change it completely”, and to evacuate its residents. Within days, thousands of Palestinians were forcibly displaced from Hebron, and hundreds of homes were raided. Dozens of people were detained, entire communities in Masafer Yatta were sealed off, and the whole territory was locked down.

This is collective punishment, which the Fourth Geneva Convention prohibits absolutely. It unfolds alongside a record olive-harvest season of settler violence: more than 270 attacks since September, often with soldiers present. Meanwhile, more land is declared “state land” and new settlement tenders are issued.

Excellencies, what we are witnessing has a name, and those who name it are no longer isolated voices.

In January 2024, the International Court of Justice found the right of Palestinians in Gaza to be protected from genocide plausible and at real and imminent risk, and ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts.
In July 2024, the Court found Israel’s continued presence in the occupied Palestinian territory unlawful and to be ended as rapidly as possible. It also found a breach of the prohibition of racial segregation and apartheid.
Israeli historians and Holocaust scholars, among them Raz Segal, Amos Goldberg and Omer Bartov, reached the conclusion of genocide.
So did Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
So did the International Association of Genocide Scholars.
So did the Israeli organisations B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights–Israel. B’Tselem titled its report, in plain words, Our Genocide.
In September 2025, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry, whose Chair is with us today, concluded that genocide is being committed in Gaza.

The facts have been established and the law has been applied. Under the Genocide Convention, every State’s duty to prevent arose once a serious risk of genocide became known. After the Court’s Order of January 2024, no State could claim ignorance.

Yet the international community has not mobilised in proportion to these findings. Rather the contrary. Arms continue to flow. Trade continues, especially of the oil and gas which is fuelling occupation, apartheid, colonisation and genocide. And so do investments, diplomatic cover and the welcoming of individuals subject to arrest warrants of the International Criminal Court. The States able to make a difference have offered statements instead of measures, and recognition of Palestine without action to end the occupation that makes a Palestinian State impossible.

Nowhere is this failure clearer than in the abandonment of UNRWA. The Agency is the lifeline of millions of Palestine refugees and the backbone of humanitarian response in Gaza. It has been legislated against by a Member State, its premises attacked, and hundreds of its staff killed. It has been defamed through allegations of systematic infiltration that were amplified by the media and never substantiated. Several donors suspended funding on that basis and plunged the Agency into crisis. The International Court of Justice has since confirmed Israel’s obligation to facilitate the work of the United Nations, including UNRWA. And still, the defence of a UN body by its own Member States has been timid at best.

Mr. Chair, this brings me to my central message.

I fear that many in the UN underestimate what is at stake. The United Nations was built on the ashes of two World Wars and one of the worst genocides in human history. The Genocide Convention was adopted the day before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Convention was a promise that the world would never again stand by while a people was destroyed; the Declaration, that every human being’s dignity would be protected.

If these promises fail here, in the most documented genocide in history, under the eyes of the Court, the Commission, the treaty bodies and the special procedures, the damage will not stay in Palestine. Every perpetrator, everywhere, will draw the lesson that the law is optional, and that its institutions can be starved, smeared or sanctioned into silence.

Institutions rarely collapse in a single moment. They hollow out, failure after unanswered failure, until no one believes in them anymore. Gaza may be that breaking point. Not because the United Nations lacked the tools, but because its Members chose not to use them.

It is not too late. Implement the Court’s orders and the General Assembly’s resolutions. Suspend arms transfers and trade that sustain unlawful occupation and genocide. Fund and protect UNRWA. Protect the journalists and preserve the record, because accountability depends on it.

History will ask what each of us did. Let our answer not be that we watched.

Thank you.

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