The United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, said that she had been subjected to attacks and received numerous threats since she began her mission to prepare a report on Israeli crimes in the Gaza Strip.

Albanese confirmed, during a press conference about her report submitted to the Human Rights Council on the devastating Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, that after 5 months of analyzing the massacres carried out by Israel in Gaza, the reports confirm the presence of elements indicating that Israel is committing the crime of genocide in Gaza. Its elements have been completed.

She said that Israel is carrying out three acts that fall within the framework of genocide, which are killing Palestinians in Gaza, displacing them, and imposing living conditions that lead to partial or complete physical destruction against them.

She stressed that Israel is using banned weapons against the Palestinians in Gaza and is starving them, "and this is a set of war crimes that have never occurred before in the occupied Palestinian territories."

She said that what Israel is doing in Gaza is creating conditions that make life impossible for the Palestinians, and that what Israel is committing reflects its intention to destroy everything, which is classified as a crime of genocide.

She pointed out that Israel said that its goal was to destroy the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), but its actions led to the killing of many Palestinian civilians.

A call to stop Israel's crimes

The UN rapporteur called on the world to confront Israel's brutality and force it to abide by international law, and stressed that Israel has manipulated international humanitarian law to justify the violations it is committing in Gaza.

She also confirmed that the Palestinian people have lived through practices that pave the way for genocide since 1947, and added, "We need more research to determine whether what happened in 1948 was genocide," in reference to the Palestinian Nakba.

Albanese stressed, during a symposium at the United Nations in Geneva - yesterday, Tuesday - on the sidelines of the work of the Human Rights Council, that Israel has been committing many crimes and violations that have been continuing for decades against the Palestinians, including the crime of apartheid.

The UN rapporteur called for all necessary measures to be taken to defend the Palestinians’ right to life and to end crimes against them.

She added, "I find reasonable reasons to believe that the minimum threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide against the Palestinians as a group in Gaza has been met."

Killing, harming and subjugating

In her report, the UN rapporteur enumerated three types of acts of genocide: “killing members of the group, causing serious harm to the physical or mental integrity of members of the group, and deliberately subjecting the group to living conditions that would lead to complete or partial physical destruction.”

Hamas said that the statements of the UN rapporteur on genocide are additional confirmation from a senior UN official.

The movement added - in a statement - that this puts the international community and the United Nations before a real test to protect humanity, and to stand up to their responsibilities to prevent acts of genocide that humanity exceeded decades ago.

The movement called on the International Criminal Court "to move beyond the silence and take urgent action to hold the occupation leaders accountable for the genocide and ethnic cleansing they are committing against our Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip in full view of the world."

Israel has been waging a devastating war on the Gaza Strip for more than 5 months, leaving more than 32,000 martyrs and about 75,000 wounded, most of whom are children and women, amid warnings from international organizations of famine, especially in the northern Gaza Strip, as a result of the occupation restricting the entry of aid.

For its part, Israel rejected the findings of the Special Rapporteur.

Agence France-Presse quoted an American official - in response to the report of the UN rapporteur - that the United States has no reasons to believe that Israel committed acts of genocide in Gaza.

The American official said that his country reaffirms its long-term rejection of the mandate given to this special rapporteur who is biased against Israel, as he described it.