UN rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who has become notorious for her anti-Israel bias, claimed on Monday that the world has given Israel "a license to torture Palestinians", AFP reported.
Speaking as she presented her latest report to the UN Human Rights Council, Albanese alleged that "torture has effectively become state policy" in Israel.
"Israel has effectively been given a license to torture Palestinians, because most of your governments, your ministers, have allowed it," she charged.
Albanese's report claimed Israel was systematically torturing Palestinian Arabs on a scale "that suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent".
"Torture extends far beyond prison walls, in what can only be described as a torturous environment imposed by Israel across the entire occupied Palestinian territory," she told the Human Rights Council.
"The testimonies that I and many others are documenting are not only tragic stories of suffering; they are evidence of atrocity crimes targeting the totality of the Palestinian people, across the totality of the occupied land, through a totality of criminal conduct," claimed Albanese.
Responding to the comments, Israel's mission in Geneva said in a statement, "Francesca Albanese is not a promoter of human rights; she is an agent of chaos... and any document she produces is nothing but a politically-charged, activist rant."
Albanese "advocates dangerous extremist narratives to undermine the very existence of the State of Israel", it said.
Albanese has repeatedly come under fire over her anti-Israel bias. She was recently condemned by several European Union foreign ministers for comments made at an Al Jazeera conference, in which Albanese had said: “The fact that instead of stopping Israel, most of the world has armed, given Israel political excuses, political sheltering, economic and financial support ... We who do not control large amounts of financial capitals, algorithms and weapons, we now see that we as a humanity have a common enemy."
Albanese later claimed in an interview with France24 that she "never, ever, ever said ‘Israel is the common enemy of humanity,'" calling the accusations "completely false accusations."
Albanese’s history of anti-Israel statements and actions is well-documented and dates back to social media posts uncovered in 2022, in which she claimed that the “Jewish lobby" controls the US.
At the time, Albanese rejected arguments that the comments about the “Jewish lobby" were antisemitic and claimed they were “mischaracterized", but her anti-Israel bias has continued to be exposed since.
Her criticism of Israel has grown since Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack in Israel. The attack, in which Hamas terrorists killed over 1,200 people and took 250 hostages, was described by Albanese as an act that must be viewed in “context" and as a response to Israeli “aggression."
She has also, in recent months, accused Israel of genocide, likened the Government of Israel to the “Third Reich," and compared Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler.
Albanese was sanctioned by the US last year in response to her criticism of Israel’s policies during the war with Hamas in Gaza.