United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese suggested in her new report on October 31, Genocide as Colonial Erasure, that Israel’s genocidal violence on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is integral to the Zionist regime’s goal of colonising Palestine.

This is the Italian lawyer’s second report on Gaza. Her Anatomy of Genocide, released in March, found there were reasonable grounds to believe that Israel’s actions in Gaza had met a thresholds indicating it is committing genocide.

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The new report includes Israel’s violence to the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

Albanese is known as the “good Albanese”, after putting Australia’s media in its place at the National Press Club last November.

She said while “the scale and nature of the ongoing Israeli assault” varies in different areas, the totality of “the Israeli acts of destruction directed against the totality of the Palestinian people” warrant the application of the “Genocide Convention”.

Albanese assesses the Israeli-made catastrophe in Gaza through the lens of the Genocide Convention (the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide), the Apartheid Convention, international humanitarian, human rights and criminal and customary law.

It is also informed by the International Court of Justice’s finding in July that the Israeli occupation is unlawful.

The UN special rapporteur concludes that nation states that are party to the Genocide Convention have a legal obligation to prevent “the serious risk of its continuous breach”.

Albanese said that, as she was writing, Gaza’s official death toll surpassed 42,000 people although the true figure is likely thousands more. This included more than 13,000 kids, and more than 700 babies, with “many shot in the head and chest”.

Distribution sites, tents, hospitals, schools and markets have all been attacked. “The magnitude of destruction in Gaza has prompted allegations of domicide, urbicide, scholasticide, medicide, cultural genocide and ecocide,” Albanese wrote. “Nearly 40 million tons of debris, including unexploded........

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