GENEVA: The world has given Israel “a licence to torture Palestinians”, a UN expert said on Monday, with life in the occupied territories “a continuum of physical and mental suffering”.

“Torture has effectively become state policy” in Israel, said Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur on the rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories.

While presenting her latest report to the UN Human Rights Council, she said this situation came about “because most of your governments, your ministers, have allowed it”.

A relentless critic of Israel’s “genocide” in Gaza, while Albanese has been hailed in the Muslim world, she has faced US sanctions and harsh criticism from Israel and some of its allies.

The UN’s special rapporteur said that Israel’s systematic torture of Palestinians was on a scale that suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent.

“Torture extends far beyond prison walls, in what can only be described as a torturous environment imposed by Israel across the entire occupied Palestinian territory,” the UN Human Rights Council was told.

She said torture destroys the conditions that make life meaningful, stripping away human dignity, leaving empty shells behind.

“The testimonies that I and many others are documenting are not only tragic stories of suffering; they are evidence of atrocity crimes targeting the totality of the Palestinian people, across the totality of the occupied land, through a totality of criminal conduct,” she said.

Albanese warned that the international response would be a test of countries’ collective legal and moral responsibility.

“Disregard for international law will not stop in Palestine. It is already unfolding from Lebanon to Iran, across the Gulf countries, and in Venezuela. And if left unchecked, it will spread far beyond,” she said.

Palestinian ambassador Ibrahim Khraishi told the council that the practices documented in Albanese’s report “are not just individual cases of torture but amount to collective and systematic torture.

Pakistan, speaking for the 57-member Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, added: “Impunity has been entrenched and safeguards eroded. “These crimes are being committed with the intent to inflict individual and collective suffering on the people under occupation in order to erase them from their own native land.”

Published in Dawn, March 24th, 2026