‘World has given Israel a license to torture Palestinians’: UN rapporteur

A prominent UN rapporteur has condemned the international community for giving Israel carte blanche to torture Palestinians in the occupied territories, describing life in the area as "a continuum of physical and mental suffering."

Francesca Albanese, the UN's special rapporteur on the rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, said on Monday that "torture has effectively become state policy" in the Israeli-occupied lands.

"Israel has effectively been given a license to torture Palestinians because most of your governments, your ministers have allowed it," she stated while presenting her latest report to the UN Rights Council.

“What once operated in the shadows is now practiced openly: a regime of organized humiliation, pain and degradation, sanctioned at the highest political levels,” Albanese said in the report, titled “Torture and genocide”.

“Torture is not confined to cells and interrogation rooms,” the report outlined.

“Through the cumulative impact of mass displacement, siege, denial of aid and food, unrestrained military and settler violence, and pervasive surveillance and terror, the occupied Palestinian territory has become a space of collective punishment, where the destruction of the conditions of life turns genocidal violence into a tool of collective torture with long-term mental and physical consequences for the occupied population,” it added.

Albanese called on UN member states to “prevent and punish” acts of torture and genocide, and uphold international law.

“Its increasing use as part of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people makes this violation all the more grave and indefensible,” she said, according to a UN press release.

“If the international community continues to tolerate such acts when inflicted on Palestinians, then the law itself will be stripped of meaning.”

The Albanese's report comes as the official Palestine TV reported that Israeli soldiers had tortured a one-year-old Gaza child to force confessions from his father during an interrogation.

The television channel aired footage showing injuries to the child, identified as Karim, after he was detained by Israeli forces near the al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip.

In reaction to the horrendous crimes, Iran's Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf said the world must choose to stand either with the besieged Gaza Strip or with child torturers, stressing that there is no middle ground.

“Iran is fighting for humanity. The world is either with Gaza and against this colonial terror regime, or it stands with the Epstein class and child torturers. There is no middle ground,” Qalibaf stressed in a post published on his X account on Monday.

According to Palestinian medical officials, at least 677 Palestinians have been killed and 1,813 others injured in Israeli attacks across the Gaza Strip since a ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Hamas resistance movement took effect in October 2025.

The ceasefire halted Israel’s two-year genocidal war, which was launched in October 2023 killed more than 72,000 Palestinians and injuring over 171,000.

The bloody onslaught also resulted in widespread destruction of about 90% of civilian infrastructure in the coastal region.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.ir