UN rapporteur says world has given Israel 'a licence to torture Palestinians'

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territory, Francesca Albanese, told the Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday that the international community has effectively permitted Israel to torture Palestinians, as she presented a new report describing what she characterises as a systematic, state-directed regime of abuse since October 2023.

"Israel has effectively been given a licence to torture Palestinians, because most of your governments, your ministers, have allowed it," Albanese said in her address to delegations on 24 March 2026.

Israel rejected the findings outright. Its mission in Geneva described Albanese as "not a promoter of human rights" but "an agent of chaos", and said any document she produces is "nothing but a politically-charged, activist rant." The mission added that she advocates what it called dangerous extremist narratives intended to undermine Israel's existence.

Following Albanese's address, several delegations delivered statements of support. Iran's delegation condemned what it described as the ongoing attacks, intimidation, and defamation aimed at discrediting and silencing the Special Rapporteur in her reporting on human rights violations in the Palestinian territories.

Scale of detention since October 2023

The report submitted to the council's sixty-first session, draws on more than 300 testimonies, remote consultations with legal experts and survivors, and a review of primary sources including accounts by Israeli whistleblowers. Israel denied Albanese direct access to the territory.

According to the report, Israeli forces have arrested more than 18,500 Palestinians since October 2023, among them at least 1,500 children, doctors, journalists, humanitarian workers, and staff of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA).

As of February 2026, Israel held 9,245 Palestinians across various detention facilities: 1,330 sentenced prisoners, 3,308 remand detainees, 3,358 administrative detainees held without trial, and 1,249 classified as unlawful combatants.

More than 4,000 individuals have been subjected to enforced disappearance since October 2023. The report notes it is likely that many are no longer alive.

Between 84 and 94 Palestinians have died in Israeli detention during that period, with some remaining unidentified. Israeli authorities have withheld information on detainees' whereabouts and identities, making the true death toll unverifiable. The report also documents the withholding of bodies from families, compromising autopsies and preventing mourning.

Detention conditions and methods of abuse

The report identifies two main categories of detention facility in use since October 2023: ad hoc military-run camps, among them Sde Teiman, Anatot, and Ofer, and Israel Prison Service facilities.

Among the facilities reopened during this period is the Rakefet underground jail at Ayalon Prison, which had been closed in 1985 on account of its inhumane conditions. The report states it was reopened on the orders of National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The report describes Ben-Gvir's publicly stated goal of degrading prisoner conditions as a central driver of policy. On 14 November 2023, he ordered that detainees labelled as terrorists be held handcuffed in dark cells with iron beds and pit toilets, with the Israeli national anthem played on continuous loop.

Documented methods of abuse include waterboarding, suspension by handcuffed wrists for prolonged periods, severe beatings with batons and other weapons, burning with cigarettes, forced stress positions, administration of hallucinogenic drugs, and the use of pepper spray, tear gas, and electric shocks.

Detainees are held outdoors without shelter or in caged enclosures, kept blindfolded and shackled for extended periods, subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation, starvation, and dehydration, and denied access to toilets, showers, and prayer. Some have been forced to wear diapers for protracted periods.

Interrogation sessions are described as lasting hours or days, punctuated by confinement in what the report calls disco rooms, where deafening music is used to induce sensory overload and psychological collapse. Explicit threats to harm, rape, or kill detainees and their family members are characterised as routine.

Sexual violence and deaths of medical personnel

Sexual violence, including rape involving objects such as iron bars, batons, and metal detectors, is documented as widespread across detention facilities. Detainees are described as being subjected to electric shocks to the genitals and anus, forcibly stripped in humiliating conditions, and photographed naked.

Among those who died in custody are three named doctors — Adnan al-Bursh, Iyad al-Rantisi, and Ziad al-Dalou — and paramedic Hamdan Abu Anaba. More than 50 UNRWA employees were also detained, interrogated specifically about their work, and subjected to torture, according to the report.

The death of 17-year-old Walid Khalid Ahmad in Megiddo Prison in March 2025 is cited as illustrative of the conditions imposed on children in detention. An autopsy documented starvation, dehydration, untreated infections, and systemic neglect.

Broader torturous environment across occupied territory

The report argues that torture in this context extends beyond detention facilities, describing a torturous environment imposed across the entirety of the occupied Palestinian territory.

In Gaza, the report documents mass displacement of nearly two million people, the near-total destruction of the healthcare system, at least 40,000 life-altering injuries including approximately 4,000 limb amputations, and at least 461 deaths from malnutrition since October 2023, among them 157 children.

In the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, more than 1,000 Palestinians were killed between 2023 and 2025. Documented settler attacks rose from approximately 1,860 in the period 2021 to 2023 to at least 3,088 in the period 2023 to 2025, with settler groups operating under what the report describes as conditions of legal impunity and institutional protection.

The report characterises the cumulative effect of mass displacement, siege, denial of aid, unchecked settler violence, and pervasive surveillance as constituting collective psychological torture at scale, designed to break resistance, dignity, and social cohesion.

Legislative and judicial enablement

The report examines the role of Israeli state institutions in enabling and normalising the practices it documents. The Knesset, Israel's parliament, has repeatedly amended detention laws since October 2023 to expand executive powers, suspend statutory detention conditions, and permit deportation of family members of individuals designated as terrorist operatives.

In November 2025, the Knesset endorsed a death penalty initiative targeting Palestinian detainees — a proposal the report describes as a dangerous escalation.

Israel's High Court of Justice is described as having consistently declined to reverse collective punishment measures, grant access for independent observers to detention facilities, or compel disclosure of information about disappeared Palestinians.

Only one prosecution has been brought since October 2023. A military court sentenced a reservist to seven months' imprisonment in February 2025 for assaulting bound detainees. By contrast, the report notes that the official who leaked footage of the sexual abuse of a Palestinian detainee at Sde Teiman was prosecuted, while the perpetrators were publicly celebrated by senior ministers.

ICC arrest warrants sought for three ministers

In its recommendations, the report calls on the Office of the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) to immediately request arrest warrants for Ben-Gvir, Katz, and Smotrich, as well as the Chief of the General Staff of the Israeli military and senior Israel Prison Service officials.

Albanese concluded her address to the council in stark terms, stating that genocide had become the ultimate form of torture: continuous, generational, and collective.

She also warned that failure to act on violations in the Palestinian territories would carry consequences beyond the region, citing what she described as related patterns of disregard for international law involving Iran, Gulf states, Lebanon, and Venezuela. "What is lost in Palestine will be lost to us all," she said.