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Francesca Albanese wrote that states that supported Israel financially and militarily "could and should be held liable for aiding, assisting, or jointly participating in internationally wrongful acts."
A report by one of the United Nations’ leading experts on Israel-Palestine describes the more than two years of genocide in Gaza as a “collective crime,” for which all nations with financial, diplomatic, and military ties with Israel are culpable.
The draft report, published Monday, was written by Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, who is expected to speak at length on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza this weekend as part of the Nelson Mandela Foundation’s lecture series in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Her report names more than 60 countries, without which she says the systematic destruction of Gaza—which has killed or injured more than 10% of the strip’s population and displaced nearly everyone there—would not have been possible.
“Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanize the Palestinians, this livestreamed atrocity has been facilitated through third states’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection, and, in some cases, active participation,” Albanese wrote. “The world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal. Renewal is only possible if complicity is confronted, responsibilities are met, and justice is upheld.”
Her report says that the states most responsible are “primarily Western ones,” the United States being chief among them.
The US accounts for two-thirds of Israel’s annual arms imports. And according to a report out this week from the Center for International Policy, it has spent over $38 billion since October 2023, both directly arming Israel through military grant programs and waging war against its enemies in Iran, Lebanon, and other nations across the Middle East.
Under both a Democratic and Republican administration, the US has also provided critical diplomatic cover for Israel, proposing temporary “pauses” and “truces” to the conflict before international bodies, “sidestepping a permanent ceasefire and ensuring a continuation of the violence.”
On several occasions, the US has used its veto power to block unanimous votes in favor of a binding ceasefire resolution by the UN Security Council. In September, it did so for the fifth time, vetoing a 14-1 resolution that would have required both parties to halt the violence and release all hostages.
The US has sanctioned the International Criminal Court (ICC), which issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. The Trump administration also placed Albanese herself under sanctions in July for her support of the ICC’s efforts.
American non-governmental organizations supported by US President Donald Trump were also directly involved with the creation and administration of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), which administered aid sites after humanitarian organizations like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) were pushed out. In just over three months, more than 1,000 Palestinian aid seekers were killed in routine massacres by Israeli troops, who have described the GHF sites as “killing fields.”
Many senior US politicians, Albanese said, have helped to prolong the genocide through rhetoric that frames Israeli lives as more important and worthy of protection than Palestinian ones.
“Israelis were depicted as ‘civilians’ and ‘hostages,’ and Palestinians as ‘Hamas terrorists,’ ‘legitimate’ or ‘collateral’ targets,’ ‘human shields’ or lawfully detained ‘prisoners,’” she wrote.
Albanese also singled out many European nations as particularly culpable. These include Germany, which provided Israel with over $565 million worth of weapons, making it the second-largest exporter behind the US; and the United Kingdom, which has participated in hundreds of surveillance missions over Gaza and whose prime minister, Keir Starmer, defended Israel’s right to cut off water and power to civilians at the war’s outset.
She also called out others that increased trade with Israel during the two years of genocide—Germany, Poland, Greece, Italy, Denmark, and France—as well as Arab countries like the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco. She said their continued economic support not only “legitimizes and sustains the Israeli apartheid regime” but “countered the trade decline Israel might otherwise have faced” as a result of its increasing global isolation.
Albanese wrote that for helping Israel, which she described as a “genocidal apartheid state,” these nations “could and should be held liable for aiding, assisting, or jointly participating in internationally wrongful acts.”
Though a ceasefire is now in effect between Israel and Gaza, Albanese said on Wednesday that the plan, which currently has Israel occupying more than half the Gaza Strip, was “absolutely inadequate and it doesn’t comply with international law.”
She said that the recognition of a Palestinian state by several Western nations in recent months has “been a pretense of doing something while the emergency was to discuss... how we stop the genocide.”
Albanese said that the states “who still have ties with Israel, diplomatic, but especially economic, political, and military ties, are all responsible in some measure.”
"US military interventions of the 20th century brought dictatorships, disappearances, and decades of trauma to our nations," the Latin American leaders emphasized.
Dozens of political leaders throughout Latin America are condemning US President Donald Trump's boat-bombing spree, which began in the Caribbean last month but has since spread to the Pacific Ocean.
In a letter posted by Progressive International on its X account, the Latin American leaders from across the region said that Trump's campaign of extrajudicial killings of purported drug traffickers is threatening peace and stability in Latin America, and is likely a pretext for further military intervention in the region.
"The Trump administration is escalating a dangerous military buildup off the coast of Venezuela, deploying naval forces in the Caribbean in preparation for potential armed intervention," they wrote. "The pretext is familiar. President Trump justifies intervention in Venezuela as a means to combat 'cartels,' celebrating lethal strikes against fishermen accused of carrying drugs."
The lawmakers then linked the Trump administration's current militarism to past US actions that had destabilized their nations.
"We have lived this nightmare before," they emphasized. "US military interventions of the 20th century brought dictatorships, disappearances, and decades of trauma to our nations. We know the terrible cost of allowing foreign powers to wage war on our continent. We cannot—we will not—allow history to repeat itself."
They called upon "all organized political forces across Latin America and the Caribbean" to unite in the name of preventing another "catastrophe" from occurring.
"Across our political contexts, we share a common cause: the sovereignty of our nations and the security of our peoples," they concluded. "We must stand together now."
The US military has carried out at least nine attacks on boats in the Caribbean and in the Pacific Ocean over the past seven weeks, killing at least 37 people so far. Although the administration has claimed that these boats were engaged in illegal drug smuggling, it has provided no evidence to justify this claim—and both Trump and Vice President have jokingly said it would be dangerous "to even go fishing" in the Caribbean, suggesting civilians could be killed in the strikes
Colombian President Gustavo Petro this past weekend said that the Trump administration had “committed a murder” after one of its boat attacks killed a Colombian citizen named Alejandro Carranza, who had been out on a fishing trip when the US military attacked his boat.
The Trump administration's boat strikes have been condemned not only by leaders in Latin America, but also by multiple US-based legal experts who have accused the administration of going on an extrajudicial murder spree. Experts have noted that the US has long approached drug trafficking as a criminal offense—not an act of war to be responded to with military force.
The Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a US-based think tank, announced on Thursday that it was launching a new project aimed at tracking "US militarism, aggression, and intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean," including "US strikes on boats, threats against Venezuela and Colombia, and other aspects of US interventionism in the region under the second Trump administration."
Alexander Main, CEPR's director of international policy, said that the Trump administration's recent actions across Latin America represent "a dangerous new escalation with an open disregard for international law and agreements" that could have "profound implications beyond the region."
"Yet another Israeli government lie—slavishly repeated by Western media—collapses," said one policy expert.
The commissioner-general of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees said Wednesday that he welcomed an "unambiguous ruling by the International Court of Justice" affirming that the organization has not been infiltrated by Hamas, as Israel and its allies have persistently claimed, and that Israeli officials must cooperate with the UN to ensure Palestinians receive sufficient aid after nearly two years of starvation policy.
In an advisory opinion, the ICJ ruled 10-1 that as the occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza, Israel is responsible for providing aid to Palestinians and allowing the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) to operate in Gaza.
Israel has sought to ban UNRWA from Gaza since January 2024, when it alleged without evidence that a small number of staffers at the agency had participated in a Hamas-led attack on southern Israel in October 2023.
Multiple investigations found that Israel had not provided supporting evidence of the allegations, and the ICJ on Wednesday said that the country had “not substantiated its allegations that a significant number of UNRWA employees were members of Hamas.”
With the advisory opinion, said Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, "yet another Israeli government lie—slavishly repeated by Western media—collapses."
ICJ President Yuji Iwasawa said in the ruling, which is not legally binding, that Israel's first obligation is to "ensure that the population of the occupied Palestinian territory has the essential supplies of daily life, including food, water, clothing, bedding, shelter, fuel, medical supplies, and services."
The court also ordered Israel to "agree to and facilitate by all means at its disposal relief schemes on behalf of the population of the occupied Palestinian territory so long as that population is inadequately supplied, as has been the case in the Gaza Strip."
UNRWA has said it has roughly 6,000 aid trucks that are ready to enter Gaza.
"With huge amounts of food and other lifesaving supplies on standby in Egypt and Jordan, UNRWA has the resources and expertise to immediately scale up the humanitarian response in Gaza and help alleviate the suffering of the civilian population," said Philippe Lazzarini, commissioner-general of the agency.
Israel began blocking humanitarian aid from entering Gaza following the Hamas-led attack in 2023, and intensified the blockade from March-May this year after breaking a ceasefire that began in January. More than 450 Palestinians have starved to death, and experts have warned that the many of the effects of starvation on those who have survived, especially children, may be irreversible. A famine was declared in August by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a UN-backed group.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the ICJ opinion "comes at a moment in which we are doing everything we can to boost our humanitarian aid in Gaza. So the impact of this decision is decisive in order for us to be able to do it to the level that is necessary for the tragic situation in which the people of Gaza still is.”
As it has with numerous other rulings by the ICJ, Israel immediately rejected the decision and claimed it was politically motivated. The US State Department also dismissed the ruling, saying it "unfairly bashe[d] Israel" and repeated the debunked allegations of UNRWA's "deep entanglement with and material support for Hamas terrorism."
Step Vaessen of Al Jazeera reported that "even if Israel ignores [the advisory opinion], as it’s done time and time again, all the UN countries are obliged to follow up on this court’s advice."
The ICJ is also considering a genocide case against Israel, brought by South Africa.
In September, a commission of independent experts at the UN said Western countries including the US must stop providing military aid to Israel as it found the country was carrying out a genocide in Gaza, citing several of the attacks that have killed more than 68,000 Palestinians since October 2023 and public statements made by Israeli officials demonstrating their intent to wipe out Gaza's population of 2.1 million people.
"This is illegal and endangers America," said one critic of Trump's boat-bombing campaign.
The Trump administration launched another military strike on a purported drug trafficking boat on Tuesday night, and for the first time expanded its campaign of extrajudicial killing to the Pacific Ocean.
In a social media post, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth claimed that President Donald Trump had authorized "a lethal kinetic strike on a vessel being operated by a designated terrorist organization and conducting narco-trafficking in the Eastern Pacific." Hegseth also said that the strike killed two passengers who were aboard the vessel.
This marks at least the eighth time the US military has attacked a purported drug-trafficking boat, although the previous seven strikes took place in the Caribbean. Collectively, the strikes have killed at least 34 people.
In the wake of the latest boat attack, many Trump critics once again slammed the administration for carrying out what they described as acts of murder.
Conor Friedersdorf, a staff writer at The Atlantic, described the attack as "another unlawful extrajudicial killing of a boat our military could have stopped and investigated."
Friedersdorf also emphasized that these killings would be unlawful even if the people on the boats were involved in narcotics trafficking.
"Even when convicted drug smugglers go to court, they don't get the death penalty," he wrote. "This is immoral."
Kenneth Roth, former executive director for Human Rights Watch, tore apart the administration's legal argument for treating alleged drug smuggling as an act of war by a hostile foreign power.
"Trump's rationale for his repeated murders at sea don't hold water," he wrote in a post on X. "There is no 'self-defense' because no one is attacking the United States. There is no 'armed conflict' because there are no hostilities approaching a war."
Jill Wine-Banks, former Watergate prosecutor and US general counsel of the Army, warned in a post on Bluesky about the dangers of further widening Trump's bombing campaign.
"He must be stopped," she wrote. "This is illegal and endangers America."
Journalist Mark Jacob said he was highly skeptical that the administration was carrying out these attacks to stop the flow of drugs into the US.
"The Trump regime lies all the time," he wrote on Bluesky. "A more likely explanation for these attacks is US imperialism: Trump wants to overthrow Maduro in Venezuela (with vast oil reserves) and intimidate Colombia (which criticized previous attacks)."
Colombian President Gustavo Petro this past weekend said that the Trump administration had "committed a murder" after one of its boat attacks killed a Colombian citizen named Alejandro Carranza, who had been out on a fishing trip when the US military attacked his boat.
Trump responded by baselessly calling Petro "an illegal drug leader strongly encouraging the massive production of drugs," while also levying new tariffs against Colombia.