Francesca Albanese Is A Mirror Too Many Are Afraid To Face
Maybe the question isn't whether it is 'worth it' for Francesca to be a bold mirror for us, but whether we are worthy of her unbothered brilliance.
“No one in my life is more important than anyone else, including you Krishnan, so if you were in Gaza with your family, you would be very happy to have someone like me taking the risk because you would be seen at least.”
Francesca Albanese
The illusion of a ceasefire in Gaza has once again been shattered—not by those under siege, but by the architects of their suffering. Overnight, Israeli airstrikes rained down on the densely packed enclave, killing over 400 Palestinian people in a few hours. The response from the world’s so-called arbiters of peace? A deafening shame-inducing silence.
Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, laid this out plainly in her conversation with Channel 4’s Krishnan Guru-Murthy: This is not a war, but the enforcement of an occupation. It is not a matter of Hamas and Israel; it is a matter of apartheid, treating an entire population as dispensable. Her words cut through the manufactured myths—myths that allow policymakers to pretend negotiations are occurring between equals when one side controls the land, air, and water the other is allowed to drink.
The choreography of destruction follows a familiar script. First, the framing: a “conflict” between two equal sides, rather than an occupying force and the occupied. Second, the justification: the ever-elastic invocation of “self-defense,” a phrase that applies only to the nuclear-armed state, never to the civilians who have lived on the land for centuries and whose homes are reduced to dust. And third, the cycle’s most insidious feature: the erasure of Palestinian humanity. To be murdered in Gaza is to disappear, to be reduced to a statistic, framed as an inevitability or “byproduct” of war rather than the result of deliberate policy. Are we Palestinians products being sold, or are we human beings who deserve dignity?
International law is not abstract. The bombing of civilians, the destruction of hospitals, the ongoing siege—these are crimes, not “tragic consequences.” Yet, the international community continues to prop up Israel’s impunity, ensuring that victims will never see justice. How many times must we hear that Israel has the “right to defend itself” without recognizing that Palestinians have the right to exist without being bombed into oblivion?
Albanese reminds us that this is not a recent escalation but a decades-long policy of subjugation. Since 1948, Palestinians have been fighting not just for land but for the right to be seen as fully human. The dehumanization is so effective that their deaths are reported passively—“Gaza was hit by airstrikes,” “Palestinians were killed”—as though no one pulled the trigger.
There is no ceasefire when one side remains occupied, when world powers claiming to champion human rights fund and enable dispossession. Israel’s war machine is not responding to Hamas; it is perpetuating a system of domination that has persisted for generations.
What we are witnessing is not self-defense—it is the brutal enforcement of an apartheid regime. Until the world stops contorting itself to avoid naming this truth, the cycle will repeat, with Palestinian children’s bodies serving as the ledger of history’s hypocrisy.
History does not unfold in silence; it is written in the screams of those who refuse to be erased. War is measured in bodies, in the breath of those suffocating under siege, in the nameless graves of those denied the right to live free.
When Israel justifies its bombardment of Gaza, killing 400 Palestinians in hours, it does so with the clinical precision of a legal argument, stripping Palestinians of their humanity while clothing violence in self-defense rhetoric.
The argument is familiar: a state has the right to defend itself. This mantra is repeated in the halls of power and in Western media. But sovereignty does not bestow legitimacy upon any action. If Israel has the right to exist and defend itself, what of the Palestinians? What of the people forced into statelessness, condemned to live under military occupation?
Under international law, a people under occupation have the right to resist. That right does not dissipate because the occupying power deems it inconvenient. Nor does it vanish when resistance is criminalized by the same governments that arm the occupier. The International Court of Justice has ruled that Israel’s presence in Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem is unlawful and ordered Israel to withdraw, cease settlement construction, and relinquish control over Palestinian land and resources. These rulings remain ignored by the very nations claiming to uphold international order.
The reality is stark: Israel does not invoke self-defense against another sovereign state but against the people it occupies. An occupier cannot claim self-defense against the occupied. This is established international law, yet the myth persists, repeated often enough to obscure its absurdity. The burden of proof is always on the oppressed, not the oppressor.
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