'Francesca Albanese Deserves the Nobel Prize, Not U.S. Sanctions'

July 17—These were the words of Richard Falk, the American diplomat, who served as the UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories from 2008 to 2014, the same position Francesca Albanese occupies today, and for which she has been sanctioned by Secretary of State Marco Rubio for charging Israel with genocide in Gaza. Rubio’s sanctioning Albanese on July 9, Falk told Truthout, was “an intimidating attack on Albanese … for her brave truth-telling and expert knowledge…. Her well-documented reports have broken the mainstream silence in the West on Israel’s genocidal assault, carried out before the eyes and ears of the world, shocking many by its transparency and sadism over a period of more than 20 months. She has also exposed shameful patterns of U.S. complicity with Israeli criminality.”

Falk notes the irony of Albanese being sanctioned on July 9, the same day that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu arrived in Washington to be welcomed by President Donald Trump. Netanyahu nominated Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, “but it is Albanese who deserves it,” says Falk, “not the punitive pushback by way of targeted sanctions denying her entry into the country and freezing any American assets she may have.” He goes on to document Albanese’s extraordinary work as Special Rapporteur, the two reports she issued in 2024—“Anatomy of a Genocide” on July 1, and “Genocide as Colonial Erasure,” October 1—both presented with devastating detail to document Israel’s systematic annihilation of the Palestinian people and destruction of all vestiges of human existence and infrastructure in the Gaza Strip.

Albanese’s most recent report, “From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide,” provoked apoplectic hysteria among U.S. and Western elites with its detailed exposure of the largely U.S. corporate infrastructure—arms producers, Big Tech, universities, banks, energy and communications companies, and hundreds of others—all complicit in Israeli genocide in Gaza. Falk commented that “these sanctions on Albanese carry defiance of international law to another level, by inverting justice and punishing those who dare document what the U.S. government insists on covering up.” Marco Rubio’s statement announcing the sanctions against her reflected his uncontrolled rage.