Evidence presented: UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese addressed delegates from the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation and held a media conference afterwards on Tuesday. Photo: Nelson Mandela Foundation
This week, from a podium in Cape Town instead of the UN floor in New York, Francesca Albanese delivered the most damning assessment yet of Israel’s genocide on Gaza.
The UN special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories told the general assembly that the campaign amounts to genocide and that governments and corporations far from the battlefield are helping enable it.
Prevented from travelling to New York by US sanctions, she addressed delegates from the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation. A debate intended for the UN chamber shifted to a country where calls for accountability over Gaza have grown louder in recent months.
Albanese was in South Africa at the invitation of the Nelson Mandela Foundation to deliver the 23rd Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture.
Last Saturday, she addressed more than 3 500 people at Johannesburg’s Sandton Convention Centre — a public demonstration of the country’s prominence in the global push to defend international law.
Her UN presentation continued that theme, shifting from moral warning to legal charge. Her argument centres on intent. The Genocide Convention requires evidence that destruction is deliberate.
Albanese points to mass civilian deaths, the collapse of essential infrastructure and the dehumanising rhetoric of senior Israeli officials. She says these form a pattern of organised destruction. In her view, those who provide political protection or the flow of weapons and resources cannot claim neutrality.
During the debate, Israel’s ambassador launched a personal attack on Albanese rather than engaging with the substance of her findings. The chair reprimanded him.
Israel maintains its campaign targets Hamas and is conducted within the limits of international law.
South Africa used its speaking slot to list the rights stripped away under occupation: life, security, movement, food, healthcare, housing and education. It argued that the systematic denial of these rights amounts to apartheid and — in Gaza’s context — to genocide.
Namibia, which has backed South Africa’s case in The Hague, warned that the world can no longer rely on claims of ignorance. Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba and Malaysia echoed the call, insisting that accountability cannot be selective.
Albanese dismissed attacks on her credibility. She noted that it is Israel, not the UN, that stands before international courts on allegations including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. The evidence presented, she said, has not been met with a substantive rebuttal.
What makes the report especially unsettling for powerful states is its examination of complicity beyond the battlefield.
Military power depends on supply chains, diplomatic cover and financial guarantees.
Albanese argues decisions taken in boardrooms, ports and exchanges far from Gaza enable the violence.
Outrage, she suggests, has become a global spectator sport while the machinery of destruction remains well resourced.
This argument lands squarely in South Africa. Speaking in Johannesburg last week, Albanese said the country’s legal position must match its economic relationships.
Civil society groups have turned their attention to coal exported from South Africa to Israel’s energy sector.
Glencore, with major local operations, denies wrongdoing. Rheinmetall’s partnership with Denel has also drawn scrutiny, with activists seeking guarantees that components manufactured domestically are not used in Gaza.
Attorney and lecturer in Human Rights, Law and Development Studies at the Wits School of Governance, Dr Thandiwe Matthews, said Albanese’s reports since 2022 have charted clear violations of Palestinian rights, including arbitrary detention and the targeting of children and civilian infrastructure.
She said the latest findings go further by defining the legal contours of genocide and identifying the role of external actors — state and corporate — whose support enables it.
“All actors, and especially third-party states, have a duty to ensure that Israel complies with international law,” she said.
“Ordinary citizens must hold governments and businesses to their obligations.
If South Africa is to uphold international law at the International Court of Justice, then the state and the private sector must ensure they are not sustaining or profiting from a conflict we are challenging in court.
“Albanese has provided documentary evidence of where responsibility lies. We all have a duty to uphold international law under our own Constitution.
“None of us can say we didn’t know.”
Johannesburg advocate Shabnum Mayet said accountability must reach into South African institutions: “To call for the prosecution of genocidaires at an international level, yet let those complicit in genocide walk free at home, is dangerous not only for our collective conscience but can have very real consequences on our security”
Political analyst Ebrahim Fakir said Pretoria’s credibility would be tested in the months ahead.
If the government insists genocide is taking place in Gaza, Fakir argued, then economic and professional links with Israeli state institutions cannot continue unexamined.
International law cannot remain a courtroom argument. It must become visible in policy.
Albanese has outlined steps she believes follow from international law. These include suspending military, trade and diplomatic cooperation with Israel; investigating officials and companies linked to serious violations; cooperating with international courts and applying economic pressure, including divestment, until the occupation ends.
South Africa’s executive is still deciding how far to go.
Parliament voted last year to suspend diplomatic ties with Israel. It is a directive the executive has yet to implement fully.
The case in The Hague has elevated Pretoria’s global standing but it has strained relations with those Western governments that continue to supply weapons and diplomatic cover to Israel.
Pretoria must now reconcile its domestic policy and economic interests with the legal expectations it has placed on the international system.
Albanese has warned repeatedly that statements of concern do not save lives.
Action does. South Africa has presented itself as a defender of international law.
The credibility of that stance now depends on the decisions that follow.