Anti-Israel UN Special Rapporteur Calls for UN to Expel Jewish State

The United Nations’ notoriously controversial special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories has called for the UN to expel Israel as a member state of the world body, once again raising questions of her impartiality.

“Time to #UNseatIsrael from the UN,” Francesca Albanese wrote on X/Twitter on Thursday.

Albanese was responding to a tweet from Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur “on the right to adequate housing,” who wrote it was “high time to take action against Israel including through unseating from the UN, as was done with apartheid South Africa.”

The outrage came after Israeli forces struck a UN facility in Gaza which, according to the military, was being used by Hamas terrorists as a command center. Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that rules Gaza, notoriously embeds its fighters within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeers civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.

The UN facility hit in Gaza belonged to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the UN organization dedicated solely to Palestinian refugees and their descendants. UNRWA has been accused of aiding Hamas, and Israel has said employees of the agency participated in the terrorist group’s Oct. 7 onslaught across southern Israel. UN officials deny the allegations, arguing their mission in Gaza is critical to ensuring humanitarian aid gets to the civilian population.

“Our troops found UAVs, war rooms used for surveillance operations, and large quantities of weapons, including tactical drones, rockets, machine guns, mortars, explosives, and grenades in a compound near UNRWA’s HQ in Gaza City, following intelligence that Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists and infrastructure were embedded inside,” the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said in a statement regarding its operation targeting the facility. The IDF also said there were tunnel routes near the compound.

In response to Albanese’s tweet, Hillel Neuer — the executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO that monitors the UN — lambasted the special rapporteur for what he described as an anti-Israel bias.

“You are violating your duty to act with impartiality. Under no circumstances is a UN mandate holder entitled to call for the removal of a member state,” he wrote.

Albanese’s call to expel Israel is the latest chapter of her extensive history of using her role at the UN to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize Hamas’ attacks on the Jewish state.

The UN recently launched a probe into Albanese’s conduct over allegedly accepting a trip to Australia funded by pro-Hamas organizations.

In April, Albanese issued public support for the pro-Hamas protests and encampments on US university campuses, saying that they gave her “hope.” Earlier that month, she accused Israel of destroying Gaza and committing genocide in the Hamas-ruled Palestinian enclave, from which the terrorist group launched the current war by invading the Jewish state on Oct. 7, massacring 1,200 people, and kidnapping 250 others as hostages. At a public hearing at the European Parliament on April 9, the UN rapporteur devoted much of her time to accusing Israel — but not Hamas — of lying about its conduct in Gaza.

That hearing came about two weeks after Albanese released a report accusing Israel of carrying out “genocide” in Gaza, continuing a pattern of the UN official singling out the Jewish state for particularly harsh condemnation. Albanese’s report did not mention any details about Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel. Israeli officials lambasted her findings, arguing they were misleading and excused terrorism.

In February, Albanese claimed Israelis were “colonialists” who had “fake identities.” Previously, she defended Palestinians’ “right to resist” Israeli “occupation” at a time when over 1,100 rockets were fired by Gaza terrorists at Israel. Last year, US lawmakers called for the firing of Albanese for what they described as her “outrageous” antisemitic statements, including a 2014 letter in which she claimed America was “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.”

Albanese’s anti-Israel comments have earned her the praise of Hamas officials in the past.

In response to French President Emmanuel Macron calling Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel the “”argest antisemitic massacre of the 21st century,” Albanese said, “No, Mr. Macron. The victims of Oct. 7 were not killed because of their Judaism, but in response to Israel’s oppression.”

Video footage of the Oct. 7 onslaught showed Palestinian terrorists led by Hamas celebrating the fact that they were murdering Jews.

Nevertheless, Albanese has argued that Israel should make peace with Hamas, saying that it “needs to make peace with Hamas in order to not be threatened by Hamas.”

When asked what people do not understand about Hamas, she added, “If someone violates your right to self-determination, you are entitled to embrace resistance.”