UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese Suggests Israel Leveraged Oct. 7 Massacre to Justify ‘Colonization’ of Gaza

The United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories suggested this week that the Hamas terror group’s massacre across southern Israel last Oct. 7 benefited the Jewish state by allowing Israel to justify its “colonization” of Gaza. 

While speaking at the Busboys & Poets bookstore in Washington, DC on Monday, Francesca Albanese argued that Israel has intensified its campaign of supposed “oppression” against the Palestinian people. The controversial UN official claimed that the Jewish state has weaponized the tragedy of the Oct. 7 atrocities to legitimize a so-called “genocide” against the civilians of Hamas-ruled Gaza. 

“Today, as the Palestinians have been victimized, the object of humiliation and indignity, extrajudicial killing, arbitrary arrest, and detention for decades — this has been sort of ignored, and after the 7th of October, a new level of rage was directed at Palestinians,” Albanese said. “The 7th of October is a tragic date for the Israelis, but this is what also triggered the opportunity for Israel to complete and channel the project of colonial erasure. Israel seized the opportunity to complete that plan of realizing Jewish sovereignty only in the land of Palestine.”

Last Oct. 7, Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists invaded southern Israel, where they murdered 1,200 people, wounded thousands more, and kidnapped over 250 hostages back to neighboring Gaza while perpetrating systematic sexual violence. Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities.

Albanese claimed that Israel has continued to expand upon what she described as the colonization “project” that its founders supposedly started. 

“This has been an obsession of many in Israel since the very project of the founding fathers of Israel,” Albanese said. 

The UN official argued that the “indigenous” Palestinians were expelled from their land by foreign Jews for the purpose of creating an exclusionary ethnostate, erasing the millennia-long presence of Jewish people within the land of Israel.

“If you look at what the founding fathers of Israel wrote up to 50, 60 years ago, they openly  talked about colonization,” she said. “They used to say, let us colonize Palestine as the Brits have colonized India, as the French have colonized Algeria, because up to 70 years ago, colonialism was totally acceptable. Today, it’s not and so the narrative has changed.”

Albanese argued that Israel has laid siege to Gaza to ensure that Palestinians have “no place to return to, no means to resist, to survive in the place that they have called home.” She then accused Israel of attempting to “depopulate” northern Gaza of its civilians as part of the final stages of the so-called “genocide” in the war-torn enclave.

Albanese has an extensive history of using her role at the UN to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize Hamas’s attacks on the Jewish state. In the months following the Oct. 7 atrocities, Albanese has accused Israel of enacting a “genocide” against the Palestinian people in revenge for the attacks and circulated a widely derided and heavily disputed report alleging that 186,000 people have been killed in Gaza as a result of Israeli actions. 

The United Nations launched a probe into Albanese over the summer for allegedly accepting a trip to Australia funded by pro-Hamas organizations. She has also celebrated the anti-Israel protesters rampaging across US college campuses, saying they represent a “revolution” and that they give her “hope.”

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