Image Credit: JACK GUEZ / Contributor / Getty 
(LifeSiteNews) — According to a United Nations official, Israel’s ethnic cleansing, bombing and starvation campaign being waged against the people of Gaza is turning them into “monsters,” setting them back to a state of existence which “predates civilization.”
Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Israeli occupied Palestinian territories, said “the situation in Gaza has gone so rotten, so horrible, that I really don’t have the words to describe it anymore.”
As part of the trashing of Israel’s ceasefire agreement with Hamas, which was brokered by the incoming Trump administration in bad faith, Israel committed another war crime in instituting a total blockade of all humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip beginning on March 2.
READ: ‘Pro-life’ GOP starving 1 million children to death in Gaza, USCCB remains silent
While the starvation in the enclave became catastrophic, Israel announced a plan to distribute food and water through a private security company. This began in late May with distribution sites set up in the south as a means of corralling the besieged population into a small area where Israeli army commanders often ordered their soldiers to fire upon them massacring hundreds.
In her interview with Chris Hedges last Wednesday, Albanese said she often hears people from Gaza reflecting on the impact of this harrowing situation of starvation and violence being inflicted upon them by the Israeli army, and they say, “we are turning into monsters.”
“The hunger is so much, it’s so widespread, so profound, that it’s turning people into a stage of pre-humanity,” she mourned. “And this is what happens to people who experience this brutality, that they are pushed back into a space which predates civilization.”
And considering that this situation “is strategic” and “intentional from Israel, it’s a stain for all of us,” the Italian legal scholar continued. “How can we let it happen? Why have European states or Arab states not sent their navies to break the blockade? It must be done.”
“It’s an obligation, it’s not an act of charity. They must break the siege. And it’s already too late,” said Albanese. “This is the situation in Gaza. It’s devastating,”
‘Coercive measures’ against Israel necessary to save Palestinians in Gaza and ‘protect Israel’
In March of last year, the acknowledged expert on human rights released a reportarguing that the actions of the state of Israel “meet the threshold for the definition of genocide” according to the Genocide Convention of 1949, of which Israel is a signatory.
In October she released an update which concluded, “The violence that Israel has unleashed against the Palestinians post-7 October is not happening in a vacuum, but is part of a long-term intentional, systematic, State-organized forced displacement and replacement of the Palestinians.”
READ: Expelling the Palestinian people has always been a goal of Zionism
For this reason, Albanese firmly emphasized to Hedges that “the sacrifice of the Palestinians in Gaza will continue unless there is an arms embargo and unless the siege is broken. And it cannot happen without coercive measures.”
“The only way to protect Israel, to ensure that Israel is protected, is by stopping Israel,” the scholar emphasized. “Israel is harmful to the Palestinians, to the region, is harmful to many of us, and is harmful to itself and its citizens.”
With Gaza destroyed, it’s time for Palestinians to return to ‘their original homeland,’ Israel
Speaking with sympathy for the Israelis as well, she said “they must be traumatized to the point that they have lost their humanity.”
Albanese, who is also an Affiliate Scholar at Georgetown University, said given that “80 percent of the [Israeli] population supports their government in maintaining this level of violence toward the Palestinians” indicates that “the only victory for this government… is to get rid of the Palestinians” according to their “planned ethnic cleansing” campaign.
READ: Former Israeli defense minister affirms IDF is committing ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Gaza
This process is happening right now with the two million people of Gaza and will later be a focus for the approximately 3.3 million people in the West Bank. Following this, these religious Zionists will likely turn their barrels onto 2.1 million Palestinians who are citizens of Israel.
“These are the three stages of the planned ethnic cleansing of historical Palestine,” she said, and despite the enormous violent pressure, with starvation and the like, the surviving Palestinians have not stooped to beg other countries to let them immigrate.
And since they cannot stay in Gaza as it has been largely destroyed by the Israelis, and continues to be, Albanese told Hedges, that “there is a place where the Palestinians from Gaza will move” and this “is Israel.”
“This is the opportunity to let the Palestinians return to their original homeland,” she said, making reference to the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the lands from which they were driven by the Israelis in 1948 and after.
“And I understand that this comes as a huge shock for the Israelis, but sooner or later they would have been confronted with this,” she said.
“Sorry, you’re living on stolen land,” Albanese continued. “And the only redemption that you can have in this life is making right the wrongs of the past. So this is what conscientious Israelis should do.”
Those who have ‘dared denouncing the abhorrent reality in Palestine’ routinely face ‘a litany of falsehoods’
The Italian wife and mother of two also addressed the well-orchestrated smear campaigns directed against her by Israel and their proxies saying “what happens to me is not unique in the sense that being accused of being ‘pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic,’ it’s the litany of falsehood that everyone from the pope to the [UN] secretary-general to scholars, activists, journalists, anyone with a minimum of decency who has dared denouncing the abhorrent reality in Palestine had to face.”
She referred to such assailants as just “barking dogs” who want to distract her, but are unable to, and they “don’t matter.” Her experience is that whenever they come after her with their calumnies she always receives so much more support.
“My anchor continues to be international law” and “the solidity of the facts” in order to “to tell them who they are, to put them in front of a mirror,” Albanese explained. “And it’s not that they don’t like me. They dislike the image that through me they get of themselves, genocidéra or supporter of a genocide.”
A documented genocide, conservative estimates of over 282,000 dead
As Israel continues to massacre and starve Palestinian civilians on a daily basis, reliable reports of Palestinian deaths number at least 56,500, including 17,400 children, at a confirmed minimum with at least 133,419 people injured. These dead do not include around 14,000 who are missing and presumed dead and buried under the rubble.
According to a rationale presented in a Lancet study in July of last year, one can conservatively estimate total deaths, including indirect fatalities due to causes like starvation, lack of medicine or proper medical care to include 282,500 (124,300 children).
Last December, advocacy groups Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Internationalreleased extensive reports concluding Israeli authorities were deliberately seeking to bring about the destruction of the people of Gaza by various means, including the deprivation of necessities like water, food, energy and medical care, amounting to crimes of genocide.
READ Genocide ‘only reasonable conclusion’ to Israel’s crimes in Gaza: Amnesty International
Additionally, in January 2024, the International Court of Justice delivered a preliminary ruling. Finding the charge of genocide against Israel to be “plausible,” and last November the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli defense chief Yoav Gallant “for crimes against humanity and war crimes,” including “starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
Corporations profiting from genocide ‘put on notice’ for legal action
Albanese went on to discuss a future report she will be releasing regarding the complicity of around 48 corporations in the occupation and now genocide including banks, insurers, pension funds and universities whom she has put on notice as being liable to legal action for violations of international law.
She also discusses how Israel has used their occupation of the Palestinian people as a “boundless training field to test” new offensive weapon technology along with “surveillance techniques that are now being used against people everywhere,” including in the U.S. and Germany which is “detrimental for all of us.”
In reflecting upon her role of monitoring, chronicling and reporting upon the ongoing genocide in Palestine, along with its challenges including the orchestrated resistance and even death threats she is subject to, Albanese reassured, “whenever I manage to go to bed and sleep, I have no regrets because I’m doing what everyone should be doing.”
