The U.N. special rapporteur to the occupied Palestinian territory claimed this week that Israel does not have a right to self-defense against Hamas under international law and accused the country of committing \u2018war crimes.\u2019<\/p>\n
The comments from Francesca Albanese came Tuesday during an address to the National Press Club of Australia, when she deemed Israel\u2019s right to self-defense \u2018non-existent\u2019 under international law as she took aim at the war-torn country for its \u2018unrelenting bombardment of Gaza\u2019 and other actions.<\/p>\n
Israel, according to Albanese, cannot claim a right to self-defense because they are not under threat from another state.<\/p>\n
\u2018Israel cannot claim the right of self-defense against a threat that emanates from a territory it occupies, from a territory that is under belligerent occupation,\u2019 Albanese said from the event in Canberra, Australia.<\/p>\n
\u2018What Israel was allowed to do was to act to establish law and order, to repel the attack, neutralize whomever was carrying out the attacks and then proceed with law and order measures \u2026 not waging a war,\u2019 she added.<\/p>\n
Anne Bayefsky, director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, slammed Albanese\u2019s comments, saying they go \u2018hand-in-hand with all her other legally-indefensible claims\u2019 surrounding the conflict.<\/p>\n
\u2018Starting from October 7th until now, no major U.N. actor has said plainly that Israel has a right of self-defense. This is despite the fact that the U.N. Charter unambiguously declares every U.N. member has the inherent right of self-defense,\u2019 Bayefsky claimed in an email to Fox News Digital. \u2018In the deafening silence, anti-Israel and antisemitic extremists hiding under the titles of U.N. \u2018experts,\u2019 have gone on the offensive and proclaimed that Israel has no U.N. Charter right of self-defense against the barbaric Palestinian terrorists who slaughtered and butchered their people. The Nazis said the same thing of their Jewish victims.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Albanese\u2019s abhorrent remarks go hand-in-hand with all her other legally-indefensible claims, such as defending a Palestinian \u2018right to resist\u2019 that \u2018requires violence.\u2019 Likewise, Navi Pillay, head of a U.N. so-called \u2018Commission of Inquiry\u2019 against Israel created back in 2021, has repeatedly spoken since October 7th of a Palestinian right of \u2018armed struggle.\u2019 These aren\u2019t misguided lawyers. They are champions of hate, of antisemitism, of lethal violence against the Jewish people. It is an atrocity that they are given U.N. titles and a global platform of any kind at all,\u2019 Bayefsky added.<\/p>\n
Albanese claimed Israel\u2019s actions toward the Palestinian people in Gaza, which have been relentless since Hamas terrorists invaded Israel on Oct. 7, are \u2018wrong.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018How many more people need to die,\u2019 she questioned at the event.<\/p>\n
Albanese also expressed concern over the potential that Israel \u2018might commit the crime of genocide against the Palestinian people\u2019 and took aim at the international community in her speech, claiming most state governments are almost \u2018completely paralyzed\u2019 amid the unfolding crisis in the Middle East.<\/p>\n
\u2018In the face of all of this, the international community is almost completely paralyzed,\u2019 she said. \u2018I am being generous when I say the U.N. is experiencing its most epic political and humanitarian failure since its creation.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018Individual member states, especially in the West, and Australia is no exception, are on the margins,\u2019 she added. \u2018Muttering notable words of condemnation for Israel\u2019s success at best or staying silent in fear of restraining Israel\u2019s \u2026 claimed right to self-defense. Whatever that means.\u2019<\/p>\n
The international community\u2019s positioning on the issue, Albanese claimed, \u2018epitomizes\u2019 how governments around the world have \u2018so ethically failed to promote peace and security for both Palestinians and Israelis, premised on international law, the end of Israel\u2019s 56-year-old patient and the realization of Palestinian self-determination and freedom.\u2019<\/p>\n
Additionally, Albanese called for a cease-fire and the return of Israeli hostages, among other things.<\/p>\n
She also used her speech to defend the Palestinians, saying they had been subjected to a \u2018violent structure of dispossession, confiscation of land, and forcible displacement.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u2018When it is widespread and systemic, [it] is not just a war crime, it is a crime against humanity,\u2019 Albanese said.<\/p>\n
Following Albanese\u2019s comments, Austrian Volker T\u00fcrk, the U.N. high commissioner for human rights, condemned on Thursday the rights violations in the Israel-Hamas war and concluded an international investigation was needed.<\/p>\n
\u2018Extremely serious allegations of multiple and profound breaches of international humanitarian law, whoever commits them, demand rigorous investigation and full accountability,\u2019 T\u00fcrk said in a briefing to U.N. member states from Geneva.<\/p>\n
In response to the U.N.\u2019s growing anti-Israel actions, Lior Haiat, Israel\u2019s spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told Fox News Digital that, \u2018Israel and the IDF operate under international law, if there should be an investigation it should be under war crimes and crimes against humanity that Hamas terrorist organization on the Oct 7 massacre and since then, including the massacre of over 1200 people and kidnapping 239, among them babies, children that have seen their parents murdered in front of their eyes, entire families, Holocaust survivors and an investigation on the use Hamas using the Palestinian people as human shields and the use of hospitals, schools and mosques as cover for their terrorist activities.\u2019<\/p>\n
Late last month, Israel\u2019s Ambassador to the United Nations Gilad Erdan urged Ant\u00f3nio Guterres to resign, ripping into the U.N. secretary-general for ostensibly rationalizing Hamas\u2019 murder of some 1,200 people, including Americans, on Oct. 7 in Israel.<\/p>\n
Guterres said Hamas\u2019 attacks \u2018did not happen in a vacuum\u2019 and that the \u2018Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.\u2019 Guterres\u2019 claim was rejected by Erdan, however, who insisted Guterres\u2019 comments were \u2018pure blood libel\u2019 and said, \u2018This is false. It was the opposite.\u2019<\/p>\n
Guterres responded to the criticism against him by noting in a statement outside the U.N. Security Council, \u2018I am shocked by the misrepresentations by some of my statements yesterday in the Security Council. As if \u2026 as if I was justifying acts of terror by Hamas. This is false. It was the opposite.\u2019<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, the United States allowed a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a pause in the fighting within Gaza to pass despite a lack of condemnation for Hamas.<\/p>\n
Fifteen members of the security council passed the resolution Wednesday, which calls for a cease-fire for a \u2018sufficient number of days\u2019 in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas. The resolution also calls for the \u2018unconditional release\u2019 of hostages taken by Hamas during the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.<\/p>\n
Twelve members of the council voted in favor of the resolution, while the U.S., Russia and Britain, who have veto power, abstained from the vote.<\/p>\n
The Hamas-controlled Ministry of Health claimed last week that more than 10,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the Israel-Hamas war, which is now in its sixth week.<\/p>\n
Fox News reached out to the United Nations secretary-general\u2019s spokesman for comment.<\/p>\n
Fox News\u2019 Adam Sabes and Benjamin Weinthal contributed to this report.<\/p>\n\n
The U.N. special rapporteur to the occupied Palestinian territory claimed this week that Israel does not have a right to self-defense against Hamas under international law and accused the country of committing \u2018war crimes.\u2019 The comments from Francesca Albanese came Tuesday during an address to the National Press Club of Australia, when she deemed Israel\u2019s <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":11736,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-11735","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-politics"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11735","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11735"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11735\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11736"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11735"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11735"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shareperformanceinsight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11735"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}