Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, has said that the US sanctions against her are “not a sign of strength.”
“The powerful punishing those who speak for the powerless, it is not a sign of strength, but of guilt,” the Italian human rights lawyer said on Thursday in a post on X.
Albanese also said on Thursday in an interview with Associated Press that she believed the sanctions were “calculated to weaken my mission.”
On Wednesday, as part of its effort to punish critics of the Israeli regime’s 21-month genocidal war against Palestinians in Gaza, the US State Department sanctioned Albanese, blaming her for prompting the International Criminal Court (ICC) to issue arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former war minister Yoav Gallant over genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Palestinian territory.
In response to the news of sanctions, Albanese assertively said she will “continue to do what I have to do.”
She questioned why she had been sanctioned: “For having exposed a genocide? For having denounced the system? They never challenged me on the facts.”
In an earlier text message to Al Jazeera, Albanese was quoted as dismissing the US move to target her as “mafia-style intimidation techniques.”
In two posts on Thursday, she wrote “Let’s stand tall, together” and urged international observers to focus on the crisis inside Gaza.
“All eyes must remain on Gaza, where children are dying of starvation in their mothers’ arms, while their fathers and siblings are bombed into pieces while searching for food,” she wrote.
She also spoke to the Middle East Eye’s live show saying: “It looks like I’ve hit a nerve.”
“My concern is there are people dying in Gaza while you and I are speaking, and the United Nations are totally unable to intervene.”
Meanwhile, Palestinians as well as rights experts from across the globe slammed the US sanctions against Albanese.
Hamas resistance movement slammed the US over the move against Albanese, saying, “The United States’ imposition of sanctions on the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Palestine, Francesca Albanese, is a blatant expression of the US administration’s blatant bias toward Zionist war crimes”.
“The punitive measures taken by the United States against institutions and individuals performing their professional and moral role in the war of extermination in the Gaza Strip, most recently Albanese, undermine the foundations of international and humanitarian law and encourage the occupation’s war criminal leaders to continue their brutal crimes,” Hamas said in a statement published on Telegram.
The group called on the US administration to reverse its policies regarding Palestinians, “which positions it as a de facto [partner] in the campaigns to kill children and women and destroy civilian life in the Gaza Strip”.
The UN rights chief, Volker Turk, called for a halt to “attacks and threats” against people appointed by the UN and other international institutions such as the ICC, whose judges have also been hit with US sanctions.
Dylan Williams, vice-president for government affairs at the Center for International Policy think-tank, labelled the US sanctions targeting judges and investigators working for the US as “rogue state behavior”.
Liz Evenson, international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said the US government’s decision to sanction Albanese for seeking justice through the ICC “is actually all about silencing a UN expert for doing her job — speaking truth about Israeli violations against Palestinians and calling on governments and corporations not to be complicit.”
“The United States is working to dismantle the norms and institutions on which survivors of grave abuses rely,” Evenson said in a statement. “UN and ICC member countries should strongly resist the US government’s shameless efforts to block justice for the world’s worst crimes and condemn the outrageous sanctions on Albanese.”
The US-backed Israeli genocidal war on Gaza continues to take more lives. Since the war began in October 2023, at least 57,762 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, with over 137,600 others injured in Israeli attacks.
