“This is not incidental violence. It is the architecture of settler-colonialism, built on a foundation of dehumanisation and maintained by a policy of cruelty and collective terror.” The concluding sentence to the summary of UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s report to the UN Human Rights Council on torture and genocide succinctly sums up how Israel has been using torture as part of its gradual annihilation of the Palestinian people. Since October 2023, torture has become a weapon in Israel’s genocide.

Albanese notes that while torture is a crime under international law, the Genocide Convention describes torture as an underlying act of genocide “when inflicted with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group “as such”. Genocide, Albanese explains from the legal framework of the Genocide Convention, “many be committed through sustained practices that break bodies, minds and collective resilience.”

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