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HRC 61 - Human Rights in OPT - 23 March 2026
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18:52
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MP4
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1.2 GB
Interactive dialogue with Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967,at the 61st regular session of the Human Rights Council.Statements by:
- Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967
- Ibrahim Khraishi, Permanent Observer of the State of Palestine to the UN Office at Geneva (country concerned)
- Issam Abu Alhaj, Independent Commission for Human Rights of the State of Palestine (country concerned)
The video includes three audio tracks: first track Interlingua (= floor), second track English, third track Arabic.
Teleprompter
Excellencies, distinguished participants, I declare open agenda item 7, entitled Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.
We will now proceed with the interactive dialogue with a Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.
Let me welcome the mandate holder, Miss Francesca Albanese.
[Other language spoken]
The list of speakers will close in 15 minutes and I now give the floor to Miss Albanese to present her report.
Madam, you have the floor.
Excellencies, I stand before you today with a deep sense of injustice and determination.
Injustice because I have served this Council.
We have rigour and in good faith.
And for doing so I have faced relentless personal threats, insults and reprisals.
Determination, because in spite of all this, I remain steadfast in my mission to bear witness, to speak the truth and to reject complicitly.
Complicity in this time of unremitting criminality.
Today I present the findings of my 8th report, the 5th documenting the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people.
It's findings highlight a hallmark of this genocide, Israel's widespread and systematic use of torture alongside the creation of a torturous environment against Palestinians.
I unequivocally condemn the torture committed by all actors, including also by Palestinian armed groups, on and after 7th of October 2023.
However, this report focuses on the use of torture in the context of the ongoing genocide, does on the actions by Israel as the occupying power, as my mandate demands.
Between October 2023 and January 2026, Israeli forces arrested more than 18,500 Palestinians, including children, especially if they were doctors, journalists or humanitarians.
Nearly 100 of them died in custody.
4000 remain forcibly disappeared, thousands detained without charge, held in inhuman conditions, beaten, shackled, sexually abused, denied medical care, starved, raped.
Israel has effectively been given a licence to torture Palestinians because most of your government, your ministers, have allowed it.
It is thanks to the courage of torture survivors and the Palestinians and Israeli NGOs who helped document their inferno, if the truth has today reached this room.
Hence I have decided to lend my voice to them to the survivors.
Quote On the 4th day in prison, an Israeli soldier threw food on the floor which was only Lebne yelling Eat off the ground you Hamas horse, just like animals, end of quote.
Quote The assaults were violent with buttons and boots leaving prisoners bleeding on the ground.
They would beat prisoners, force them to insult each other, and even howl like animals.
End of quote, Quote.
They unleashed police dogs on us again, allowing them to tear into our flesh.
One dog attacked A fellow detainee and started mulling his genitals.
He bled to death in my arms.
A doctor shielded in a cage examining from a distance and said throw him outside.
End of quote, Quote.
One of the soldiers raped me by violently inserting a wooden stick into my innas.
After about a minute he removed it and inserted it again more forcefully while I screamed loudly.
Then he forced me to open my mouth and lick the stick.
End of quote.
[Other language spoken]
They put me on a metal table, pressed my chest and head against it, cuffed my hands to the head end of the bed and pulled my legs apart forcefully.
I felt a penis penetrating my **** and a man ****** me.
I started screaming and they beat me on my back and head while I was blindfolded.
[Other language spoken]
I kept screaming and being beaten and I could hear a camera so I believed they were filming me.
I cannot describe what I felt.
I wished for death every moment.
And of course, in Israel, authorities openly boast about the sadistic treatment inflicted on Palestinian detainees.
While journalist and other civilians have been granted access to witness and even film their humiliation, officials caught on camera sodomising A Palestinian detainee with a knife are publicly celebrated.
The criminal charges against them were recently dropped.
And my report also shows that torture extends far beyond the prison walls in what can only be described as a torturous environment imposed by Israel across the entire occupied Palestinian territory.
The continuous decades long destruction of homes, hospitals, schools and infrastructure, combined with forced displacement, starvation, mass bombing, pervasive surveillance and arbitrary detention has transformed Palestinian life into a continuum of physical and mental suffering.
Quote Our brains can't process it anymore, said end of quote, said Gaza resident.
Quote The dead bodies, the explosion, it's too much.
[Other language spoken]
The cost and buzz of the throne is unbearable.
[Other language spoken]
It eats at my bones, end of quote.
The philosopher Jean Amiri, himself a survivor of torture during the Holocaust, once wrote quote.
Whoever had succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world.
End of quote.
Indeed, torture does to the individual what genocide does to a group.
As such, it destroys the conditions that make life meaningful, stripping away human dignity, leaving empty shells of being where humanity once stood.
The Palestinian people today, whether in detention, under bombardment in in Gaza, terrorised by armed criminals in uniform or settler squads in the West Bank and E Jerusalem, are enduring the pain of such intentional destruction, including those in the diaspora.
This reality cannot be understood outside it's historical context.
From the earliest years of the state of Israel, depriving Palestinians of all the rights and freedoms has been essential instruments of instruments of Israel's domination, sustained by laws, institutions and the normalisation of dehumanising rhetoric against the Palestinians.
Since October 2023, torture has effectively become state policy, sustained by a torturous culture that is socially produced, politically defended and publicly normalised.
The proposed build on the death penalty for Palestinian detainees marks yet another dangerous escalation.
Have therefore recommended that those responsible, including senior officials such as Itamer Bengvir, Bisalas Mothrick and Israel Katz, be investigated and were warranted that arrest warrants be issued.
Excellencies, the testimonies that I and many others are documented are documenting are not just tragic stories of suffering, they are evidence of atrocity crimes targeting the totality of the Palestinian people across the totality of the occupied Palestinian land through a totality of criminal conduct.
Hence, I concluded that genocide has become the ultimate form of torture.
[Other language spoken]
The way you respond to this abomination will be a test of our collective legal and moral responsibility.
International law is unambiguous.
Torture is absolutely prohibited in all circumstances, and so is genocide.
Under both the torture and the Genocide conventions, all parties have the obligation to prevent, stop and punish these crimes.
The choice before you is stark.
Either the prohibition of genocide and torture remains a binding legal norm for it.
Israel's leaders must be held accountable, together with those who stand behind them, or it will stand exposed as an empty promise and together with the millions who still believe in the universality of human rights.
I say to you again, this regard for international law will not stop in Palestine.
It is already unfolding from Lebanon to Iran, across the Gulf countries and in Venezuela, and if left unchecked, it will spread far beyond.
What is lost in Palestine will be lost to us all.
[Other language spoken]
According to our practise, we will start by hearing from the delegations of the country's concern.
I was informed that the distinguished representative of Israel is not here, and therefore I give the floor to the distinguished representative of the State of Palestine.
[Other language spoken]
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[Other language spoken]
[Other language spoken]
[Other language spoken]
I now give the floor to the Independent Commission for Human Rights of the State of Palestine.
You have the floor.
The Independent Commission for Human Rights speaks today in full solidarity with Special Rapporteur Francisca Albanese.
We value her courage, professionalism and unwavering commitment to truth and international law.
Her latest report documents what Palestinians have endured for decades, systematic torture and I'll treatment at the hands of the Israeli occupying power, beatings, humiliation, sexual abuse, denial of healthcare, prolonged isolation and extrajudicial killings.
Thousands of Palestinian detainees, including children, women and elderly have suffered these abuses in Israeli detention facilities.
Families are left in agony and aware of the fate of whereabouts of their loved ones.
88 Palestinians have died under torture.
These are not allegations, they are documented facts by reliable resources.
And yet the occupying power is not pausing.
It is accelerating legislation to codify extrajudicial killings into law.
[Other language spoken]
President, we are also witnessing coordinated campaign by several Western states to silence Special Rapporteur Albanese.
She is accused of anti-Semitism.
We challenge those states produce one piece of evidence.
Her reports are professional.
They are grounded in international law.
They are fully consistent with her mandate.
This is not about anti-Semitism.
It is about deliberately blaring the line between legitimate criticism of Israel and bigotry, a double standard designed to protect governments complicit in genocide from embarrassment.
This smear campaign is not an isolated attack.
It is part of a broader assault on international justice, threats against the International Criminal Court and its prosecutor, the destruction of honour war facilities, sanctions against the human rights defenders and restrictions on media access to Gaza.
These actions undermine the entire international legal order established after the Second World War.
We call on all states that claim to defend the human rights, defend the Special Rapporteur, implement the recommendations, enforce the rulings of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, and to civil society everywhere and people of of conscience.
Stand with courage, stand with truth, stand with Albanese.
[Other language spoken]
President, the protection of Palestinian detainees, detainees accountability for torture and and into impunity are not optional.
They are urgent legal and moral imperatives.
Standing with Miss Albanese is standing for justice, for dignity and international law.