The UN’s Francesca Albanese has asked how many people, particularly in the West, “manage to sleep at night” with Palestinians being killed in Gaza, Al Jazeera reports.

Commenting on being named UN person of the year by the PassBlue news organisation — which focuses on the UN — Albanese said that she had only responded as a “normal” person would when faced with a “genocide”.

“Like other accolades that I have received lately, speak not so much to my actions over the past 14 months — the normal opposition of a sentient human to a genocide — but rather to the silence of the many, particularly in the West, who should have spoken and acted against Israeli crimes and have chosen not to,” said Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestine territories.

Of those who had not spoken out, she said: “I wonder how they manage to sleep at night.”