UN Rapporteur Accused of October 7th Denial Following Report on Hamas’s Sexual Violence
This week, the Dinah Project released a harrowing new report documenting systematic sexual violence committed by Hamas terrorists against Israeli civilians during the October 7th massacre. The findings, based on survivor testimony and forensic evidence, underscore how rape and gender-based atrocities were used as a weapon of war—a brutal tactic intended to terrorize, humiliate, and dehumanize.
But even as this evidence continues to emerge, Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territories, has drawn fierce condemnation for her dismissive response and longstanding record of anti-Israel bias.
Professor Anne Bayefsky, Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and President of Human Rights Voices, delivered a stinging rebuke in an interview with Arutz Sheva – Israel National News. She charged that Albanese’s response amounts to a form of “October 7th denial”—akin to Holocaust revisionism in both method and motive.
“Albanese’s virulent antisemitism includes her adoption of the Nazi and neo-Nazi playbook,” Bayefsky said. “She mirrors Holocaust denial to revise the factual record of October 7. She accuses Jewish victims—and their persecutors’ ideological descendants—of mimicking the very crimes committed against them. She isn’t just spreading falsehoods; she is a propagandist for violent antisemitism, with disturbing similarities to Joseph Goebbels.”
Bayefsky warned that what makes Albanese especially dangerous is her UN-backed legitimacy: “She operates with the full support of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, and Secretary-General António Guterres. She travels globally under UN auspices, spreading her ideology from official platforms funded by international taxpayers.”
Albanese has been invited to speak at the upcoming UN General Assembly this fall, where she is expected to present herself once again as a champion of women’s rights, despite repeatedly ignoring or downplaying violence against Israeli women. Bayefsky urged the U.S. State Department to deny Albanese entry, stating, “The State Department is not obligated to admit someone who poses a direct threat to U.S. interests, security, and values. If necessary, it’s time to revisit the UN’s status in the U.S. altogether.”
Albanese’s controversial comments came during a Sky News interview, where she was asked about the Dinah Project’s findings. Rather than acknowledging the evidence, Albanese stated she had not read the report and declined to comment, suggesting instead that “Israelis have retracted their accusations” of sexual violence.
While she conditionally stated that “if such acts occurred, they deserve justice,” Albanese quickly pivoted to suggest that her real concern is how those alleged crimes relate to Israel’s actions in Gaza over the past 20 months—effectively attempting to contextualize or minimize mass atrocities through false equivalence.
Albanese’s history of inflammatory rhetoric is well-documented. In 2022, she was exposed for antisemitic social media posts alleging that the “Jewish lobby controls the U.S.” In December 2023, she condemned calls to release the 251 hostages, including infants and elderly civilians, abducted by Hamas during the October 7th attacks—calling such demands “unacceptable.” To date, she has never issued a direct call for their release, while simultaneously advocating for the release of a Gaza hospital director accused of leading a Hamas cell.
Shortly after the massacre, Albanese published a book titled J’Accuse—ironically named after the 19th-century essay denouncing the antisemitic Dreyfus Affair—in which she sought to shift blame for Hamas’s atrocities onto Israel.
Perhaps most chillingly, Albanese has explicitly denied Israel’s right to self-defense, even after the murder, rape, and abduction of more than 1,200 people on October 7th—the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
As calls grow louder to hold UN institutions accountable for the actions of their representatives, the controversy surrounding Francesca Albanese lays bare a painful truth: international platforms meant to defend human rights can, in the wrong hands, be used to distort them—even to excuse or deny crimes of unspeakable brutality.
