Israel on Friday criticised a UN rights expert for being “anti-Semite” after he supported a social media post that compared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler.
Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on the situation of rights in the Palestinian territories, has faced strong criticism from Israel before, most notably in March when she accused Israel of committing genocide during its war in Gaza.
On Thursday he responded to a post on X (formerly Twitter) that showed a photo of a crowd celebrating Hitler with a Nazi salute and cheering, while Netanyahu was pictured being welcomed by US congressmen this week.
“History is always watching us,” Craig Mokhiber, a former UN human rights official who resigned last October, accused the world body of failing to prevent a “genocide” of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, wrote in the post.
“This is exactly what I was thinking today,” Albanese, an independent expert appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2022 but not speaking on behalf of the U.N., said in her response on Thursday.
Israel’s Foreign Ministry responded immediately, hitting out at the tweet, saying it was “beyond correction.”
It added, “It is unthinkable that (the Albanians) are still allowed to use the United Nations as a shield to spread anti-Semitism.”
Israel’s mission to the United Nations in Geneva also reacted to this.
“When a current UN ‘expert’ endorses the distorted notion of genocide spread by the former (UN rights office) director in New York… the system is rotten to its core,” it says.
“It’s time to #UNseatAlbanese!”
Israel’s new ambassador to Geneva, Daniel Meron, also used the same hashtag, saying “Francesca Albanese is abusing her (UN) position to spread hate and inflammatory rhetoric.”
Israel’s top ally, America, also gave its opinion on this.
“The UN Special Rapporteur’s comparison of Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler is reprehensible and anti-Semitic,” Michele Taylor, the US ambassador to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, said on XTV.
“There should be no place for such dehumanizing rhetoric. Special Rapporteurs should seek to ameliorate human rights challenges, not exacerbate them.”
Albanese hit back at the criticism on Friday, insisting that “the memory of the Holocaust remains”.
“Institutional criticism and selective outbursts of moral outrage will not stop the process of justice, which has finally set in motion.”
The Hamas offensive that started the war on October 7 has killed 1,197 people in Israel, most of them civilians, according to an AFP count based on official Israeli figures.
Of the 251 hostages taken that day, 111 are still being held in Gaza, 39 of whom the military says are dead.
At least 39,175 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza in Israeli counter-attacks against Hamas, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
