A new report by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, titled Gaza Genocide: A Collective Crime, details exactly how the Israeli regime has carried out a genocide. Importantly, it also argues that the atrocity has been made possible, and is sustained, by the world’s most powerful countries.
Worlds most powerful countries provide the Israeli regime with bombs, cover and silence.
Albanese writes:
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel’. In her report she asks how an entire population could be destroyed while those meant to protect human rights provided the bombs, the cover, and the silence.
Albanese explains that “Israel’s decades-long occupation and its culmination in genocide could not have been carried out without the active participation of other States.” She identifies “four pillars of complicity”- diplomatic protection, military support, economic integration, and humanitarian control- that together form what she calls “the infrastructure of genocide.”
She argues that these are systemic patterns that normalise the Israeli occupation’s actions, silence accountability, and keep colonial narratives going that strip Palestinians of their humanity.
Making reference to the UN Charter, the Genocide Convention, and customary international law, Albanese reminds states that they have both “positive obligations to act against mass atrocity” and “negative obligations not to aid or recognise” it. When governments continue to arm, fund, and shield ‘Israel’, this is when they become participants in its crimes.
According to Albanese, when the actions of Third States are essential and directly contribute to a crime- so that without their involvement it would not have happened- it must be examined whether those states have moved from merely assisting to actively participating in an internationally wrongful act.
The Diplomacy of Dehumanisation
For Albanese, the genocide not only started with bombs but also with language. From the moment Hamas launched its October 7, 2023 attacks, Western leaders echoed the Israeli occupations framing of the conflict in terms that ‘dehumanises Palestinians and provides political legitimacy for collective punishment’. Biden repeated unverified claims about ‘beheaded babies’, Starmer defended ‘Israel’s’ right to cut off water and electricity to civilians. Macron, Scholz and Sunak called the bombardment ‘self-defence’.
At the UN Security Council, the US vetoed or watered down every call for a ceasefire. According to Albanese, the resolutions that did pass – which were those calling for brief “humanitarian pauses” – were “an illusion of progress” while concrete action was “repeatedly stymied.”
Western sanctions, Albanese says in the report, are nothing more than:
symbolic moral theatre, as are token gestures such as banning extremist settlers while maintaining the arms trade.
In other words, they are gestures intended to disguise complicity.
UK, United States and Germany: ‘Indispensable enablers of the assault on Gaza’
Arab nations fare no better. Albanese writes:
Their manufactured outrage has been undermined by their continued cooperation, trade and security coordination with Israel.
The report documents how Egypt sealed its border, the UAE expanded trade, and Saudi Arabia moved toward normalisation. Only Belize, Bolivia, Colombia, and Nicaragua have broken ties completely.
Albanese also traces the supply chains of the genocide. Since it started, in October 2023, the United States, Germany, and the UK have been, in Albanese’s words:
indispensable enablers of the assault on Gaza.
The US shipped more than 700 weapons consignments, approved tens of billions in new arms sales, and provided intelligence and logistical support. A $26.4 billion aid package- passed in April 2024- coincided with the Israeli occupation’s planned invasion of Rafah, an attack that Biden had previously called a “red line.”
Germany, invoking its Holocaust guilt, authorised nearly €500 million in arms exports during the war. The UK facilitated American resupply routes through its bases in Cyprus and flew reconnaissance missions whose data “was shared with Israel.”
Gaza genocide- ‘A multinational military enterprise’
Other states, including Italy, France, Canada, India, China, and also the UK provided components for the F-35 fighter jets used to level Gaza, turning genocide into what Albanese describes it as “a multinational military enterprise.” She writes that |Gaza has become a laboratory for future warfare,” while the Israeli regime’s own arms exports rose by 18 per cent, its weapons advertised as “battle-tested.”
Even humanitarian aid, the report argues, has been weaponised. Before the full siege, 80 per cent of Gazans relied on aid. After it began, the number of trucks entering the enclave collapsed, and famine spread.
‘Israel’ bombed UNRWA schools, warehouses, and shelters, killing hundreds of staff. When it accused UNRWA of Hamas ties, eighteen donor governments suspended funding without evidence. The US, instead of restoring UNRWA’s budget, helped launch the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, jointly run with the Israeli occupation – a system Albanese calls “a mechanism to manage and facilitate forced displacement of Palestinians.” Air-drops of food and medical supplies by Western powers, she adds, were “performative compassion,” and distractions from the continuing siege.
No country has suspended a trade agreement with the Israeli regime since 1967
Despite rulings from the International Court of Justice and the UN, no state has suspended a trade agreement with the Israeli regime since 1967. The European Union remains its largest trading partner, responsible for around a third of its total commerce, including dual-use materials employed in its weapons industry.
Between 2023 and 2025, trade with Germany, Italy, Greece, Poland, and Arab states such as Egypt and the UAE actually increased. Only Türkiye cut trade significantly, and even that was blunted by indirect routes. In August 2025, Egypt and the Israeli occupation signed a $35 billion natural-gas deal -the largest in the regime’s history – while Gaza was still in famine.
While the West imposes sanctions on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, in the name of human rights, the Israeli occupation is rewarded as it destroys a population, and commits genocide. Albanese calls this the
double standard of our time.
International law in ruins
By Autumn 2025, three international bodies – the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, and the UN Commission of Inquiry – had all found genocide either plausible or ongoing. Albanese warns that Third States, especially those supplying arms, have “actual or constructive knowledge” of these crimes. Their continued support, she says, may mean they are “jointly responsible for genocide under international law.”
The implications are serious. Western governments could one day face legal consequences not just for being complicit in war crimes or other international crimes, but for actively participating in them.
For Albanese, Gaza has laid bare “an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments.” She writes:
The world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal.
Demand government accountability
That renewal demands action – cutting military, diplomatic, and economic ties with the Israeli regime, supporting international courts, providing reparations to Palestinians, and, if necessary, suspending it from the UN under Article 6.
The report ends with moral urgency. Albanese calls on civil society, trade unions, and ordinary citizens to monitor their governments and demand accountability through boycotts, divestments, and sanctions. She writes:
No state can claim fidelity to human rights while arming or protecting a genocidal regime.
Justice, Albanese insists, must involve not only prosecutions but reparations-restitution, compensation, and guarantees of non-repetition:
The power structures that enabled these crimes must be dismantled.
Featured image via the Canary
By Charlie Jaay
This post was originally published on Canary.