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Francesca Albanese Won’t Back Down

Talking to the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories about genocide, standing up to the hatred of the establishment, and ending war.

Francesca Albanese, United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, attends the presentation of the book The Light of Awakening. From Palestine to the Entire World, a Manifesto of Resistance and Freedom at Spirit de Milan in Milan, Italy, on May 27, 2026.

Francesca Albanese has served as the UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian Territories since May 2022; she was confirmed for another three years in April 2025. Albanese is the first woman to hold the office. (The Nation’s editorial board member Richard Falk held the same position between 2008 and 2014.)

As special rapporteur, Albanese has been a courageous figure battling numerous efforts to discredit and delegitimize her. In March 2024, she reported to the UN Human Rights Council that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to genocide. And in June 2025, the UN published a report by Albanese stating that many corporate entities, including Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet Inc., were enabling and profiting from the occupation of the Palestinian territories and the Gaza genocide. In response, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on Albanese, naming her a “specially designated national,” forbidding all US persons and companies from doing business with her. Albanese called the sanctions “obscene” and said she was being punished for her “pursuit of justice.” Amnesty International called the move “a disgraceful affront to international justice.”

We met with Albanese via Zoom in May on the very day that a US district judge blocked the sanctions against her, ruling that they violated Albanese’s First Amendment rights. Our conversation was wide-ranging, defined by what Albanese has called her “intolerance for injustice.” It has been edited for space and clarity.

John Nichols: Early on, you did a couple of reports in which you very specifically sought to assert the word “genocide,” essentially to say to people, “Look, it is time to use this word [about what is happening in Gaza].” You faced a tremendous amount of resistance initially. Now, there’s been much broader acceptance, but I’m interested in why you made that choice at that point.

Francesca Albanese: I think that many Europeans of my generation, at least Italians of my generation, have had as part of their bread and butter an education about ‘never again.’ We have been exposed to the memory of the Holocaust. And so there is something already planted there that something as horrible as what happened during the Holocaust starts unseen, starts because the crimes against a specific group are normalized. So this was in the background; I had colleagues at the beginning of October [2023], telling me, “Oh my God, this is genocide.’ I had Israeli scholars saying, ‘This is genocide,” and I was totally reluctant. I didn’t want to use that word.

But then in the following weeks, I started studying. I started talking to academics and survivors. And I started documenting the facts and raising the risks for months [that] there could be [a genocide unfolding], because the language was genocidal. There were acts of killings, conditions calculated to destroy, endless cases of mental and physical suffering caused intentionally. And this is where I said, ‘Look, this is what Israel has done over the first five months, killing 30,000 people, an average of 150 people per day.’ Then it was statistics: 85 percent steadily were women and children. How it’s possible that this is just a miscalculation of where to throw a missile? I understood: It was a genocide, and like other genocides, it was unseen. Denial of the genocide is part and parcel of the genocide itself.

[International Court of Justice] member states have an obligation to act to prevent genocide the moment they have noticed [it]. So, in January 2024, the International Court of Justice recognized the plausible irreparable harm under the Genocide Convention to the Palestinians in Gaza. Member states had to stop all trading with Israel immediately, especially weapons. They continued.

Katrina vanden Heuvel: How far along is your work on the anatomy of genocide and complicity?

Francesca Albanese: I’ve mapped out the complicity of 66 states which are in violation of their obligation to prevent and punish acts of genocide. Clearly the United States is the state that spends the most, both militarily and in terms of financial support, but also it’s the headquarters of the biggest centers of wealth, the Big Tech, the military industry, the financial system. There is extractivism, and then weapons, and then banks and pension funds, and then the big tech—people call it technofederalism, or I call it necrocapitalism.

Palantir, for example, has developed technology based on the despair and the misery [inflicted] on the people of Gaza. And they say that. They claim it, say, “Look, this data all [worked together] while people........

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