West Jerusalem has denounced Francesca Albanese’s report as outrageous
Israeli actions in Gaza qualify as genocide on at least three grounds, according to a report by Francesca Albanese, the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur, that was leaked to the public on Monday.
Albanese was due to present her report to the council on Tuesday. The pro-Israeli group UN Watch obtained an advance copy of the document and posted it online, accusing her of anti-Semitism.
“The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group,” Albanese wrote in the report, titled ‘Anatomy of a Genocide.’
She argued that Israel has “destroyed Gaza” over the past five months, killing over 30,000 Palestinians, destroying 70% of residential areas and displacing 80% of the enclave’s residents.
There are “reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met,” said the report. It accused Israel of violating three criteria of the Genocide Convention: killing members of a community, inflicting “serious mental or bodily harm” to the group, and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
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