Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur for the occupied territories, calls for practical actions and warns against distracting ‘attention from where it should be: the genocide’
The United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied territories has warned that moves to recognise a Palestinian state should not distract member states from stopping mass death and starvation in Gaza.
“Of course it’s important to recognize the state of Palestine,” Francesca Albanese told the Guardian after several more countries responded to the mounting starvation in Gaza by announcing plans to recognize an independent Palestine. “It’s incoherent that they’ve not done it already.”
But she argued that the prolonged debate around Palestinian statehood has so far yielded no political progress, and instead enabled the spread of illegal Israeli settlements in occupied territory which have all but precluded the possibility of a Palestinian state.
“The territory has been literally eaten out by the advancement of the annexation and colonization,” she said.
