UN rapporteur says Israel's war in Gaza is 'emptying the land completely'

International report

A year of war in Gaza has undermined international law and threatens to make the strip uninhabitable, according to the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese. She tells RFI why she is making the case for Israel's offensive to be classified a genocide.

More than 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing extremely critical levels of hunger, according to the UN. Seventy percent of crop fields and livelihoods have been destroyed during the Israeli military offensive.

The war, which has claimed 42,000 lives in Gaza and left hundreds of thousands wounded, has also spread to the West Bank and Lebanon. Civilians as well as UN peacekeepers have been targeted by Israel's forces.

"I used the word 'catastrophe' for the first time back in October 2023," Albanese told RFI, "when Israel had killed 8,000, 6,000 people in the first weeks of the conflict and destroyed entire neighbourhoods, bakeries, churches, and targeted UN buildings and universities.

"This is not the way wars are conducted."

Albanese was speaking as she prepared to launch her latest report on the situation in Gaza and the other Palestinian territories, which she presented to the UN General Assembly earlier this week.

In it, she takes a long view of the current conflict, arguing that Israel's military actions form part of a systematic attempt to displace Palestinians that goes back decades – and which she calls a genocide.

"Israel occupies that land, according to the International Court of Justice, unlawfully," Albanese said.

"So Israel unlawfully occupies a territory, oppressing its people, who of course retaliate. Then they wage a war against them. It doesn't work that way."

Hamas attack, one year on - a view from Gaza

'Emptying the land'

Albanese acknowledges the deadly violence inflicted on Israelis by the attacks of 7 October last year, and she has advocated for the investigation and prosecution of crimes committed against civilians by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups.

But she warns that the trauma of 7 October has deepened Israeli animosity towards Palestinians and spurred calls for vengeance, providing the government with an opportunity to escalate its actions in the occupied territories with the goal of making them unliveable.

"As we speak, Israel is running extermination raids neighbourhood per neighbourhood in the areas that were already forcibly evacuated, ethnically cleansed of nearly 1 million people in northern Gaza," Albanese told RFI.

"Only 400,000 people remained, who have been starved, abused and bombed. What the people in Gaza have gone through is really unspeakable, and now it is emptying the land completely."

Hamas attack, one year on - a view from Israel

Israel and UN at odds

The war has brought Israel's already tense relations with the United Nations to a low point, with the Israeli parliament this week approving a controversial bill to ban the UN's agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA – considered a lifeline for Gaza – from operating on Israeli territory.

Israel claims many of the agency's staff belong to Hamas or other terrorist groups, and accused some of them of involvement in the 7 October attacks.

The UN says it investigated the allegations and identified problems with neutrality, but no proof of terror links. It warns that restricting UNRWA will have a devastating effect on aid supply chains into Gaza.

More broadly, UN leaders have called for a ceasefire and denounced starvation, mass displacements, atrocities, war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Albanese has proved an especially controversial figure, calling for the UN to consider suspending Israel as a member state over its actions.

Her stance has drawn accusations of bias and antisemitism from Israel's allies, notably the United States, which cancelled a briefing she was due to give the US Congress this week.

Washington and others argue that Israel has the right to defend itself – though Albanese questions whether its military operations are truly making it safer.

"Is it protection?" she asked. "How is what Israel is doing going to make its citizens protected? This is the question. And the blindness at the political level is mind-blowing."