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The Trump administration announced on Wednesday it was issuing sanctions against an independent official tasked with investigating human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories, the latest effort by the United States to punish critics of Israel’s 21-month war in Gaza.
The state department’s decision to sanction Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur for the West Bank and Gaza, comes after a recent US pressure campaign to force the international body to remove her from her post failed.
Albanese, a human rights lawyer, has been vocal in calling for an end to what she describes as the “genocide” that Israel is waging against Palestinians in Gaza. Both Israel and the US, which provides military support, have strongly denied that accusation.
Israel has faced accusations of genocide at the International Court of Justice and of war crimes at the ICC over its devastating military assault on Gaza. Albanese’s position has also been backed by leading genocide scholars and rights organisations.
In a post on X late on Wednesday, Albanese wrote that she stood “firmly and convincingly on the side of justice, as I have always done,” without directly mentioning the US sanctions. In a text message to Al Jazeera, she was quoted as dismissing the US move as “mafia style intimidation techniques.”
In recent weeks, Albanese has issued a series of letters, urging other countries to pressure Israel, including through sanctions, to end its deadly bombardment of the Gaza Strip. The Italian national has also been a strong supporter of the international criminal court’s indictment of Israeli officials, including the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for war crimes. She most recently issued a report naming several US giants among companies aiding what she described as Israel’s occupation and war on Gaza.
“Albanese’s campaign of political and economic warfare against the United States and Israel will no longer be tolerated,” the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, posted on social media. “We will always stand by our partners in their right to self-defense.”
Albanese has been the target of criticism from pro-Israel officials and groups in the US and in the Middle East. Last week, the US mission to the UN issued a scathing statement, calling for her removal for “a years-long pattern of virulent antisemitism and unrelenting anti-Israel bias”.
The statement said that Albanese’s allegations of Israel committing genocide or apartheid are “false and offensive”.
It is the culmination of an extraordinary and sprawling campaign of nearly six months by the Trump administration to quell criticism of Israel’s handling of the deadly war in Gaza, which is closing in on two years. Earlier this year, the Trump administration began arresting and deporting faculty and students of American universities who participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations and other political activities.
Rights experts slammed the US sanctions against Albanese. Dylan Williams, vice-president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy thinktank, labeled them as “rogue state behavior” while Amnesty International said special rapporteurs must be supported and not sanctioned.
“Governments around the world and all actors who believe in the rule-based order and international law must do everything in their power to mitigate and block the effect of the sanctions against Francesca Albanese and more generally to protect the work and independence of Special Rapporteurs,” Agnes Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general and a former UN special rapporteur herself, said.
The war between Israel and Hamas began on 7 October 2023, when Hamas-led militants stormed into Israel and killed nearly 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 people captive. Israel’s retaliatory campaign has killed more than 57,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s health ministry, which says women and children make up most of the dead but does not specify how many were fighters or civilians. The number is widely believed to be a huge underestimate.
Nearly 21 months into the conflict that displaced the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million people, it is nearly impossible for the critically wounded to get the care they need, doctors and aid workers say.
“We must stop this genocide, whose short-term goal is completing the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, while also profiteering from the killing machine devised to perform it,” Albanese said in a recent post on X. “No one is safe until everyone is safe.”
With Associated Press and Reuters
English (US) ·