Overview
On 23 March 2026, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese, presented her latest report to the UN Human Rights Council during its 61st session. The report examines Israel’s systematic use of torture against Palestinians from the occupied Palestinian territory since 7 October 2023, and illustrates how it functions as a “structural feature of the ongoing Israeli genocide and broader settler-colonial apartheid” (para. 1).
As with previous reports, the Special Rapporteur’s attempts to gather evidence for the report were obstructed by Israel, thus the report relies on remote consultations with legal experts and torture survivors as well as 300 written testimonies, collected by numerous organisations, along with an analysis of primary and public sources, including accounts by Israeli whistle-blowers (para. 2). The Special Rapporteur was also denied entry to Egypt, where she had planned to meet with released Palestinian prisoners and hear their testimonies about conditions inside Israeli prisons.
To showcase the link between torture and genocide, the report analyses the rationale behind the torture, (paras. 19-22) followed by a closer look specifically at torture in detention, its drastic escalation since October 2023 (paras. 23-29) and the main methods of torture systematicaly used against both adult and child detainees (paras. 30-46), revealing how torture functions as a strategy of the genocidal campaign. The report then shifts perspective and addresses genocide as a mode of torture, considering the implications of inflicting severe physical and psychological suffering on the entire group as such. Here, the report breaks down the genocidal process intended to eliminate the capacity of a group to survive, finding that in Gaza, it has turned the entire strip into a torture camp (para. 50-60), while in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, a torture continuum has evolved whereby techniques of settler colonial expulsion and genocide are wielded to inflict sustained collective suffering and intergenerational trauma (paras. 61-68). The analysis regards torture as the aggregate effect of genocidal violence pursued by Israel, rejecting the fragmented characterisation of torture as discrete conduct that has historically enabled impunity (paras. 69-71). Finally, it addresses the pervasive perception at all levels of Israeli society that there exists a ‘right to torture’ Palestinians, noting that it has turned torture into a collective enterprise (paras. 72-81).
The Special Rapporteur documents how torture has become integral to the domination, collective punishment and annihilatory violence aimed at Palestinians as a people, inflicting long-term pain and suffering and imposing a continuous, territorially pervasive regime of psychological terror designed to break bodies, instil collective fear, deprive a people of their dignity and force them from their land. This reflects the very architecture of settler-colonialism, built on a foundation of dehumanisation through a policy of cruelty and collective torture. Having always been a central component of Israel’s dispossession of Palestinians, torture has become a structural feature of the current genocide.
The report outlines how Palestinian people are being subjected to multiple humiliations and types of violence both through custodial and non-custodial forms of torture. The former manifests in the brutal practices of Israel’s detention system and the broader carceral regime which normalise cruelty and operate as an ideological project of societal destruction and debilitation of the Palestinian nation. On the other hand, the non-custodial collective torture takes the form of mass displacement, siege, denial of aid and food, unrestrained military and settler violence, and pervasive surveillance and terror, cumulating in the destruction of the conditions of life with long-term mental and physical consequences for the occupied population.
The ultimate, and avowed, objective of the ‘torturous environment‘ is the forcible removal of Palestinians to enable annexation and settler conquest, creating an intimate relationship between torture and settler-colonial genocide (para. 6). Its systematic use across an entire territory, against the population “as such” and through policies of destroying conditions of life, breaking bodies, minds, and collective resilience to erode the group’s physical integrity and psychological survival, is evidence of genocidal intent (para. 7).
Applicable legal framework
The report begins by setting out the….. |
