Israel has announced a visa ban on the United Nations special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territories over recent comments denying Hamas’s October 7 attack was “anti-Semitic”.

The UN-appointed independent expert, Francesca Albanese, last week said she disagreed with French President Emmanuel Macron’s description of the attack, which triggered full-blown fighting, as “the biggest anti-Semitic massacre of our century”.

“No,” Albanese wrote in French on social media platform X. “The victims of 7/10 were not killed because of their Jewishness but in response to Israeli oppression.”

Israel’s Foreign Minister Israel Katz and Interior Minister Moshe Arbel called her online remark “outrageous” and said in a statement she was now “denied entry to the State of Israel”.

The immigration authorities were instructed not to issue Albanese a visa, they added, also calling for her dismissal.

The ministers said in their statement that “if the UN wants to return to being a relevant body, its leaders must publicly disavow the anti-Semitic words of the ‘special envoy’ — and fire her immediately.”

Contacted by AFP, Albanese did not comment on the Israeli decision, which would effectively also bar her entry into the occupied West Bank.

But on her X account, she said: “I refuse to be intimidated by those complicit in the perpetuation of the Nakba”, the mass displacement of Palestinians around the time of Israel’s creation in 1948.