Francesca Albanese, Gaza, and the Military-Propaganda Nexus Behind the US-Israeli War on Iran

When the Israeli lobbying group UN Watch spread disinformation about Francesca Albanese, they were trying to silence her condemnations of the true “common enemy of humanity”—the illegal system of oppressive, corporate-media-military and surveillance forces shaping a brutal new world order, and now bombing Iran.

Francesca Albanese has evoked the ire of Israeli officials, the US government, and Western countries that have failed to stop, and continued to support, Israel’s genocide in Gaza. They are mad at her for doing her job and excelling at it. When she accepted the position as United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, she was a widely published human rights expert. She never hid her focus and strong positions on the rights of Palestinians or the fact that her historically grounded research focused on Israel’s occupation of Palestine. She began as special rapporteur in May 2022, and by November she gave a talk at the Irish Center for Human Rights titled, “Resetting the Mind: Settler Colonialism, Apartheid, and the Right to Self-determination in Palestine.”

Albanese has proven to be the most important global voice defending Palestinians against the Israeli extermination campaign in Gaza that has continued for 28 months. In doing so, she exposed a growing web of neocolonial forces at the forefront of genocide, still intent on completing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and turning Gaza into a multibillion-dollar resort for the billionaire class (revealed on a disgusting though rarely cited videotape). President Donald Trump’s profit-making enterprise called the “Board of Peace” convened for the first time in January, and some 60 countries were invited to join for a one-billion-dollar fee in a pay-to-play scheme that Pope Leo XIV referred to as an attempt to replace the UN. Jeremy Scahill explained on Democracy Now! what exactly this muddle of corporate shills, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and a group of ragtag government representatives are dreaming up for their Epstein-Class playground on the Mediterranean. Depriving Gazans of any independent representation or defense, their terms are these: “You either fully bend the knee and accept a colonial apartheid regime [and] accept a new reality as dystopian plantation workers on Jared Kushner’s real estate project or we’re going to kill you.” As Asal Raad pointed out, “’They’re building resorts on the graves of Palestinians… slaughtered in a genocide—for profit—and @nytimes calls it a ‘glittering plan.’”

Francesca Albanese has incisively corrected the record and debunked Israel’s denials and justifications for genocide so often repeated in the Western Press. It took her one eloquent sentence to expose media’s role in facilitating Israeli attacks on the enclave when she wrote, “Israel has written one of the darkest pages of human history and the world is still holding the pen.”

The powerful global consortium of weapons-based profiteering and neocolonial states have attacked one of the most forceful advocates for humanity, at the same time the US and Israel are bombing Iran.

She made it look easy when she shattered a foundational rhetorical question lobbed at anyone who dare criticize the state of Israel, Do you believe Israel has a right to exist? When a journalist threw that one at Albanese, she patiently explained: “Israel does exist. It is a recognized member of the United Nations.” France and Italy exist, if they want to merge that’s up to them, but she added, “What is enshrined in international law is the right of a people to exist.”

Last year over 700,000 people signed a petition nominating Albanese for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. But her effective advocacy for Palestinian rights made her the target of US sanctions. The action came after she published a study in July 2025, naming the major global corporations profiting from Israel’s ongoing occupation and genocide in Gaza. She named 60 companies that have played a role in "sustaining Israel’s settler-colonial project.” The military-industrial complex, dominated by US weapons manufacturers, is, unsurprisingly, at the heart of this nexus. The occupation and bombing of Gaza “provided a testing ground for cutting-edge military capabilities: air defense platforms, drones, AI-powered targeting tools, and even the US-led F-35 programme.” After being used on Palestinians, deadly technologies are marketed as “battle proven.” At a major weapons conference in Tel Aviv in December 2025, Israel boasted that their weapons are tested “live on Palestinians” to increase profits.

In the July report, Albanese also drew attention to the financial industries, consulting firms, social media, and public relations companies that help design the misleading narratives that have deflected blame, refused to use terms likes genocide, and parroted Israeli talking points in sanitizing Israel’s brutality.

In tandem with the nexus of military force, security surveillance, corporate and media power, its acolytes are formulating an attendant neocolonial ideology. At a Munich Security Conference in February, US Secretary of State Mario Rubio introduced the conceptual architecture for, in the words of Jonathan Cook, “a return to brutal Western colonialism,” in a speech well-received by European dignitaries. The humanitarian community is left struggling to find a way to continue to represent humanity as the ground shifts beneath their feet.

When Albanese began to expose the big picture of expanding military domination, and warned of its global consequences, the campaign to discredit her went into high gear. The latest attacks on the special rapporteur came in response to a videotape appearance she made at a conference in Doha where she argued that this growing systemic threat should be viewed as a “common enemy of humanity.”

The pro-Israeli lobbying group UN Watch, released an altered video of her talk and claimed that Albanese called Israel itself the “enemy of humanity.” One need only look at the original tape of her address to prove that she said no such thing. French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot augmented the false charges adding that Albanese condemned Israel “as a people and a nation,” and demanded her resignation. Pointing to the doctored videotape being used to portray her as antisemitic, Albanese told Medhi Hasan, “The cut and paste of that video was so rudimental that it was almost insulting to human intelligence.”

The powerful global consortium of weapons-based profiteering and neocolonial states have attacked one of the most forceful advocates for humanity, at the same time the US and Israel are bombing Iran. They are committing crimes of aggression against a sovereign state that has not threatened or attacked them, and major media outlets such as the New York Times have spurred them on. After a US bomb struck a girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran, killing 165 people (mostly girls between the age of 7 and 12), hours later another US-Israeli strike on the town of Lamerd hit mostly teenagers in a gymnasium, killing 20 youthful volleyball players. Witnesses described “the continuous screaming of the injured.” But news of these bombings were not prominently featured in establishment media. As Fatima Bhutto put it, “From Gaza to Iran, Children Have Always Been Sacrificed by Western Imperial Aims.” Trump’s illegal war is unpopular—just a quarter of Americans back the strikes on Iran—and there is no legitimate rationale for another war in the Middle East.

Former UN official and Human Rights Lawyer Criag Mokhiber has also identified what he referred to as a “US-Israeli Axis,” calling it “the greatest threat facing humanity today” and describing it this way: “A murderous bombing campaign in Iran, continuing genocide in Palestine… belligerent occupation of several countries, acts of transnational terrorism, repression at home, schemes to profit from murder and colonization… massive corruption of the public and private sectors across the West, sanctions against human rights defenders and international courts, attacks on international institutions, the dismantling of international law, mass surveillance of the rest of us, and a growing trail of blood and destruction around the globe.”

In her characteristic expression of deep humanity, woven into Francesca Albanese’s words is an alternative vision of a world shaped by humanity and freedom. “We, who do not control large amounts of financial capital, algorithms, and weapons, we now see that we, as a humanity, have a common enemy. And freedoms, the respect for fundamental freedoms, is the last peaceful avenue, the last peaceful toolbox that we have to regain our freedom.”

The gaggle of for-profit genocidaires, or what Trump calls his Board of Peace, is looking to expand its mission from Gaza to other conflicts, seeking to further dismantle international law and the humanitarian community. As the death toll escalates under US-Israeli bombs and spreads war throughout the Middle East, Negin Owilaei argues in Truthout, “We need to reckon with the American War Machine,” and I would add, push back against the common enemy of humanity—the growing nexus of military and propaganda alliances.