Albanese

Francesca Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on Palestine, has taken aim at states complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza, calling for a new multilateralism that will prevent it from happening again in future.

Albanese presented her new report – “Gaza Genocide: a collective crime” – to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, addressing delegates remotely from the Desmond and Leah Tutu Legacy Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa.

Israel had, she said, left Gaza “strangled, starved, shattered”. Her report, which examines the role of 63 states in Israel’s actions in both Gaza and the West Bank, calls out the multilateral system for “decades of moral and political failure” in a colonial world order sustained by a global system of complicity”.

“Through unlawful actions and deliberate omissions, too many states have harmed, founded and shielded Israel’s militarised apartheid, allowing its settler colonial enterprise to metastasise into genocide, the ultimate crime against the indigenous people of Palestine,” she said.

Genocide had been enabled, she said, through diplomatic protection in international “fora meant to preserve peace”, military ties ranging from weapons sales to joint trainings that “fed the genocidal machinery”, the unchallenged weaponisation of aid, and trade with entities like the European Union, which had sanctioned Russia over Ukraine yet continued doing business with Israel.

The 24-page report analyses how the “live-streamed atrocity” was facilitated by third states, zooming in on how the United States provided “diplomatic cover” for Israel, using its veto power at the UN Security Council seven times and controlling ceasefire negotiations. Other Western nations had collaborated, it said, with abstentions, delays and watered-down draft resolutions, reinforcing “a simplistic rhetoric of ‘balance’”.

Many states had, it said, continued supplying Israel with arms, “even as the evidence of genocide … mounted”. The report noted the hypocrisy of the US Congress passing a $26.4bn package for Israeli defence, just as Israel threatened the Rafah invasion – supposedly a “red line” for the administration of former US President Joe Biden.

The report also points a finger of blame at Germany, the second-largest arms exporter to Israel during the genocide, with supplies ranging from “frigates to torpedoes”, and the United Kingdom, which has allegedly flown more than 600 surveillance missions over Gaza since war broke out in October 2023.

While acknowledging the “complexity of regional geopolitics”, the report also highlighted the complicity of Arab and Muslim states through US-brokered normalisation deals with Israel.

It points out that mediator Egypt maintained “significant security and economic relations with Israel, including energy cooperation and the closing of the Rafah crossing” during the war.

Albanese said the UNGA should have confronted the “dangerous precedent” of sanctions imposed on her earlier this year by the United States over her criticism of Israel’s actions in Palestine, which had prevented her from travelling to New York in person.

“These measures constitute an assault on the UN itself, its independence, its integrity, its very soul. If left unchallenged, these sanctions will drive yet another nail into the coffin of the multilateral system,” she said.

The Gaza genocide “exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest”, said the report.

Speaking at the UNGA, the special rapporteur called for a new form of multilateralism, “not a facade, but a living framework of rights and dignity, not for the few … but for the many”.

Action taken in the past against South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Portugal and other rogue states had, she said, shown that “international law can be enforced to secure justice and self-determination”.

WASHINGTON — President Trump and Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese signed a critical-minerals deal at the White House on Monday as the U.S. eyes the continent’s rich rare-earth resources at a time when China is imposing tougher rules on exporting its own critical minerals.

The two leaders described the agreement as an $8.5 billion deal between the allies. Trump said it had been negotiated over several months.

“Today’s agreement on critical minerals and rare earths is just taking” the U.S. and Australia’s relationship “to the next level,” Albanese added.

This month, Beijing announced that it will require foreign companies to get approval from the Chinese government to export magnets containing even trace amounts of rare-earth materials that originated from China or were produced with Chinese technology. Trump’s Republican administration says this gives China broad power over the global economy by controlling the tech supply chain.

“Australia is really, really going to be helpful in the effort to take the global economy and make it less risky, less exposed to the kind of rare-earth extortion that we’re seeing from the Chinese,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council, told reporters Monday morning before Trump’s meeting with Albanese.

Hassett noted that Australia has one of the best mining economies in the world, while praising its refiners and its abundance of rare-earth resources. Among the Australian officials accompanying Albanese are ministers overseeing resources and industry and science, and the continent has dozens of critical minerals sought by the U.S.

The prime minister’s visit comes just before Trump is planning to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in South Korea later this month.

The prime minister said ahead of his visit that the two leaders will have a chance to deepen their countries’ ties on trade and defense. Another expected topic of discussion is AUKUS, a security pact with Australia, the U.S. and the United Kingdom that was signed during President Biden’s administration.

Trump has not indicated publicly whether he would want to keep AUKUS intact, and the Pentagon is reviewing the agreement.

“Australia and the United States have stood shoulder-to-shoulder in every major conflict for over a century,” Albanese said before the meeting. “I look forward to a positive and constructive meeting with President Trump at the White House.”

The center-left Albanese was reelected in May and suggested shortly after his win that his party increased its majority by not modeling itself on Trumpism.

“Australians have chosen to face global challenges the Australian way, looking after each other while building for the future,” Albanese told supporters during his victory speech.

Kim and Madhani write for the Associated Press.

Israeli leader claims Australian prime minister’s legacy ‘tarnished’ by decision to recognise a Palestinian state.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has stepped up his government’s bitter diplomatic dispute with Australia, claiming that Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s legacy has been irrevocably blackened by his “weakness” towards Hamas.

In an interview with Sky News Australia scheduled to air on Thursday night, Netanyahu said Albanese’s record would “forever be tarnished” by his decision to recognise a Palestinian state.

“When the worst terrorist organisation on earth, these savages who murdered women, raped them, beheaded men, burnt babies alive in front of their parents, took hundreds of hostages, when these people congratulate the Prime Minister of Australia, you know something is wrong,” Netanyahu said in the interview, portions of which were posted online by Sky News before the broadcast.

Netanyahu’s accusation appeared to refer to a disputed statement that appeared last week in the Sydney Morning Herald, in which Hamas cofounder Sheikh Hassan Yousef was quoted praising Albanese for his “political courage”.

Following the report, Hamas publicly denied that any statement had been issued by Yousef. The Palestinian armed group, which governs Gaza, said Yousef had been in Israeli custody for nearly two years without means of communicating with the outside world.

Netanyahu’s broadside against Albanese follows an extraordinary missive earlier this week in which he claimed the Australian leader would be remembered by history as a “weak politician who betrayed Israel and abandoned Australia’s Jews”.

On Wednesday, Australia’s Minister for Home Affairs Tony Burke hit back at the Israeli leader, saying strength was “not measured by how many people you can blow up or how many children you can leave hungry”, though Albanese attempted to play down the spat by saying he did not take it personally.

Relations between Australia and Israel, traditionally close allies, have sunk to their lowest ebb in decades following Canberra’s decision to recognise Palestine.

On Monday, Australia said it had cancelled a visa for Simcha Rothman, a far-right member of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, amid concerns that a speaking tour he had scheduled in the country aimed to “spread division”.

Hours after that decision, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Gideon Saar said he had revoked the visas of Australian diplomats to the Palestinian Authority.

Expressing dismay at the tensions, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry said on Wednesday that it had written to both prime ministers to urge them to address their differences “in the usual way through diplomacy rather than public posturing”.

“The sum total of human wisdom would not have been diminished in the slightest if none of these public comments had been made,” the peak body for Jewish Australians said in its letter to Albanese.

“The Australian Jewish community will not be left to deal with the fallout of a spat between two leaders who are playing to their respective domestic audiences.”

Israel has come under mounting international pressure, including from some of its closest allies, over the scale of human suffering being inflicted by its war in Gaza.

More than 62,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel since it launched its war on Gaza following Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attacks, according to Gaza’s Ministry of Health.

Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took 251 people captive during its incursion into southern Israel, according to Israeli authorities.

Israel’s prime minister accused his Australian counterpart of having “betrayed Israel” and “abandoned” Australia’s Jewish community, after days of growing strain between the two countries.

Benjamin Netanyahu said on Tuesday that history would remember Anthony Albanese “for what he is: a weak politician”.

Australia barred a far-right member of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition from entering the country on Monday, and Israel in turn revoked the visas of Australian representatives to the Palestinian Authority.

Australian Immigration Minister Tony Burke said Netanyahu was “lashing out” in response to Canberra recently announcing it would join the UK, France and Canada in recognising a Palestinian state.

“Strength is not measured by how many people you can blow up or how many people you can leave hungry,” Burke told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Wednesday.

Israel’s opposition leader criticised Netanyahu’s remarks, branding them a “gift” to the Australian leader.

Yair Lapid wrote on X: “The thing that most strengthens a leader in the democratic world today is a confrontation with Netanyahu, the most politically toxic leader in the Western world.

“It is unclear why Bibi is rushing to give the Prime Minister of Australia this gift.”

Diplomatic tensions flared on Monday after far-right Israeli politician Simcha Rothman’s Australian visa was cancelled ahead of a visit to the country, where he had been due to speak at events organised by the Australian Jewish Association (AJA).

Burke told local media at the time the government took “a hard line” on people seeking to “spread division”.

“If you are coming to Australia to spread a message of hate and division, we don’t want you here,” he said.

Last year, Burke also denied a visa to Israel’s former justice minister Ayelet Shaked, a right-wing politician who left parliament in 2022.

A few hours after the revocation of Rothman’s visa was announced, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Gideon Sa’ar said he had instructed the Israeli Embassy in Canberra to “carefully examine any official Australian visa application for entry to Israel”.

He added in a post on X: “While antisemitism is raging in Australia, including manifestations of violence against Jews and Jewish institutions, the Australian government is choosing to fuel it”.

In recent months, there have been a string of antisemitic attacks in Australia – which is home to one of the world’s largest populations of Holocaust survivors per capita.

On Tuesday, the AJA said Rothman would still appear at their speaking event virtually.

“The Jewish community won’t bow down to Tony Burke or [Foreign Minister] Penny Wong,” it said in a social media post.

Australia announced in early August that it would recognise a Palestinian state, with Prime Minister Albanese saying at the time that Netanyahu was “in denial” about the consequences of the war on innocent people.

“The stopping of aid that we’ve seen and then the loss of life that we’re seeing around those aid distribution points, where people queuing for food and water are losing their lives, is just completely unacceptable,” he said.

The state of Palestine is currently recognised by 147 of the UN’s 193 member states, and Australia’s announcement came about two weeks after similar moves by the UK, France and Canada.

In response, Netanyahu launched a scathing attack on the leaders of the three countries, accusing Sir Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron and Mark Carney of siding with “mass murderers, rapists, baby killers and kidnappers”.

More than 62,004 people have been killed as a result of Israel’s military campaign since 7 October, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.

Israel launched the offensive in response to the Hamas-led attack on 7 October, in which about 1,200 people were killed and 251 others were taken hostage.