‘Impunity won’t last forever’: What gives Francesca Albanese hope

 The UN Special Rapporteur points to the way out of the current crisis facing international law, while responding to criticism over her stance on October 7.

 By Samah Salaime January 21, 2026

 

"This is not the first atrocity to have happened in world history, but it is the first to be fully televised. I would like to ask the people in Israel: Do you see what is being done in your name? There have been reports from B’Tselem and other human rights groups, there are soldiers who have broken the silence, and some have even committed suicide. Israelis know what is happening to the Palestinian people, but they seem not to care...." 

 

"... I have huge respect for those Israelis who have managed to open their eyes and wake up to what they are part of. It’s important that as many Israelis as possible join the struggle against apartheid, because this is also something that holds them captive. You cannot commit crimes and atrocities and brutalize another people without losing your humanity in return. " 

Francesca Albanese, July 27, 2024. (Rafael Medeiros/CC BY-SA 2.0)

Midway through Francesca Albanese’s recent lecture at SOAS University of London, the young man sitting next to me in the audience quietly began to cry. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories had been speaking about the role of international law at a time of genocide, but the man was no longer paying attention. 

I asked him if he was okay and handed him a tissue. He told me that he’s a doctor from Gaza, and that he left the Strip with his wife (also a doctor) in the early months of the war. 

Then I learned the reason for his tears. In December 2023, when the Israeli army ordered the evacuation of his neighborhood in northern Gaza, his family gathered their belongings and boarded a truck to escape. But while they did so, he ran to his in-laws’ house to collect his wife, whom he had recently married. 

“Everyone got on the truck except me — my father, mother, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and their children,” he told me. “Before I got back, they were all killed in a single airstrike. I survived by chance. Everyone died. I have no one.”

I stopped listening to the distinguished speaker and the irritating questions from disgruntled audience members and continued speaking with the doctor, whose name, he told me, was Abdallah. “My mother was... READ MORE 

https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-impunity-francesca-albanese/

AS ALWAYS PLEASE GO TO THE LINK TO READ GOOD ARTICLES (or quotes) IN FULL: HELP SHAPE ALGORITHMS (and conversations) THAT EMPOWER DECENCY, DIGNITY, JUSTICE & PEACE... and hopefully Palestine, or at least fair and just laws and policies]