She spoke out about Gaza. The US turned her life upside down.

GENEVA — Francesca Albanese was on stage receiving a standing ovation when she first learned how the United States was going to punish her.

It was July 9 last year. The Italian legal expert, who is the U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, was in the Slovenian capital Ljubljana wrapping up a two-hour talk on her most incendiary report yet.

As she spoke, her tone flicked between professorial bromides on international law and flares of outrage as she detailed how some of the world’s largest companies — including giants of American tech, energy and defense — were aiding Israel in the starvation and killing of Palestinians of Gaza. Now and again she fixed the audience with a look of exasperation.

When the talk ended, Albanese stood to accept the crowd’s adulation. One of the organizers walked across the stage, leaned close and said into her ear: “The United States has imposed sanctions on you.”

Albanese’s head dropped. She stared at the floor, absorbing what it meant, thinking that she needed to call her husband and children. Sanctions would cut her and her family off from U.S. banking, travel and tech. Would they be okay? But the crowd was still there. Clapping. Hollering. Her head snapped up. She stretched her arms wide, palms facing her supporters, with a wry smile that said, “What are you gonna do?”

A few seconds later, she raised a fist in the air.

“I was scared and I thought: ‘What a mafia,’” she told me when we spoke in March, referring to the U.S. administration. “‘But they will not break us.’”

Albanese is a self-admitted partisan in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, making her loved and loathed with equal extremes of feeling.

Her supporters — including human-rights activists, Palestinians, some Israelis and a vast legion of online followers — see Albanese as a rare and forceful voice piercing the cone of silence and indifference that has fallen over Gaza while a generational crime takes place within.

This has earned her powerful enemies. Israel and U.S. officials, antisemitism watchdogs and a group of European governments say she is an antisemite, whose simplistic depiction of the conflict and inflammatory language is fanning hatred toward Jews. Some Jews who might otherwise be sympathetic to her cause find some of her public statements — which, for instance, have drawn parallels between Israel’s government and the Nazis — troubling and offensive.

But even against a campaign to discredit and silence her, the U.S. sanctions were an escalation — and an impressive expression of American power and animus. She was, after all, only an unpaid U.N. expert, whose only real weapon (aside from the symbolic authority of her office) was her voice. That’s a point her family will take up in a court in the District of Columbia on Wednesday as they challenge the sanctions on free-speech grounds.

Now she is under constraints normally reserved for narco-barons and terrorists. What had she done that was so threatening to the U.S.?

Albanese thinks she knows. “This fury comes because I poked the bear,” she said. “Not in one eye, in both eyes.”

Albanese was not always adversarial. Looking back at her younger self — a bookish kid from a strict, intellectual family in Ariano Irpino, a small town in southern Italy — she remembers a fine-honed sense of injustice to which she rarely gave voice.

She grew up admiring anti-fascist partisans like Sandro Pertini, Italy’s former president, and the prosecutors who exposed the mafia’s grip on the state, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. When she learned about the Catholic church covering up child abuse, she stopped going to Mass.

But mostly she was attracted to the power of institutions. After studying law, she went to work for the U.N., human rights NGOs and in academia and became a leading expert on the law governing Palestinian refugees. Then, in 2021, Michael Lynk, the special rapporteur on Palestine, suggested she apply to be his successor.

Whether she has been changed by what followed, or whether it revealed something hidden all along, Albanese has discovered a talent for not only documenting Israel’s abuses, but speaking about them.

“There is no glory in being a chronicler of a genocide,” she told the event in Slovenia. Yet she receives pop-star levels of adoration from her fans, which include 1.3 million followers on Instagram. They admire her frankness, courage and charisma — and her angular horn-rimmed glasses. Her daughter, she says, describes her as the Lorax — the Dr. Seuss character who makes a lonely stand for the trees even as they are chopped down — “apart from the mustache and the bald part.”

But history is often cruel to messengers. The Lorax was ignored and disappeared into the sky. Falcone and Borsellino were both blown up by the mafia in 1992. Albanese herself is being targeted by the most powerful government in the world. And it is upending her life, disrupting her family and leaving her financial future uncertain.

“I’m good at doing what I do,” she said. “Which is part of the misfortune.”

Last Thursday, I spent the day with Albanese at the U.N. headquarters in Geneva, where she was presenting her latest report.

She is one of dozens of special rapporteurs tasked by the U.N. to report on human rights issues around the world. Her role, a post created in 1993, is specifically to investigate Israel for breaches of international law in the Palestinian territories. None of her predecessors have attracted anything approaching the level of global recognition Albanese has.

She took the role in 2022, just a year before Hamas committed the atrocities of Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 people in Israel and taking 251 hostages. Then Israel responded by killing more than 75,000 Gazans, according to independent researchers publishing in The Lancet, a medical journal.

Albanese was among the first official voices to label what has happened in Gaza a genocide, the conclusion of her March 2024 report. Eighteen months later, a U.N. commission concluded the same. In November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant over alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza. Whatever the legal definition, more than half of the dead are women and children, according to the Lancet study.

Israel’s government has strongly denied committing genocide, torture or any other breach of international law. It says its operation in Gaza was an act of self-defense against a terror group, Hamas, that uses its own people as human shields. Netanyahu has called the ICC warrant a “modern Dreyfus trial” — situating it against a long history of false allegations against Jews — and said, “we do everything in our power to avoid civilian casualties.” Gallant said the operation had been done “in accordance with international law.”

The Israeli government did not respond to questions about Gaza nor Albanese. Last week in a statement posted online, the Israeli mission to the U.N. Geneva called Albanese “an agent of chaos” and said she had engaged in “virulent antisemitism, including peddling narratives that constitute Holocaust distortion and trivialization. She routinely makes statements supporting terrorist organizations, and advocates dangerous extremist narratives to undermine the very existence of the State of Israel.”

Since the beginning of the invasion, Albanese has “not had a day of lightness,” she said. When not traveling to promote her work, she works from her office on the first floor of their two-story house in Tunis, Tunisia, sifting through accounts of death, torture and rape. Her reports have titles like Russian novels: “Anatomy of a Genocide” from March 2024 and last week’s “Torture and genocide.” They condemn Israel in unambiguous terms.

“I don’t take it as an offense or as an insult when they tell me that I’m an activist,” she said. “What is the contrary? Being a pacifist? What does it mean being silent in the face of genocide?”

When I met her in Geneva, Albanese had been sleeping poorly. She was at the end of several days of nonstop meetings, events and press interviews to publicize her latest report — a synthesis of allegations of ongoing torture by Israeli authorities, drawn from more than 300 testimonies.

By lunchtime, she was visibly tired. Realizing she had an interview with the U.S.-based Democracy Now! TV program in eight minutes, she groaned. She begged her team for a sandwich, for a Ferrero Pocket Coffee, for a 20-minute lie-down. (She got the first two, but not the third.) She griped to the Democracy Now! producer about the hold music; then to me about the producer’s purported lack of humor. Even as the host Amy Goodman opened the segment, Albanese was slumped forward toward the computer, gray-black hair strewn across her face.

But when Goodman began to ask her about reports from recent days of a Palestinian father forced to watch as Israeli guards put out cigarettes on his toddler’s leg, Albanese was suddenly sitting straight, hair swept behind her ears, dangly red earrings clinking as she hit the end of every sentence like a chisel. My notes, taken during her response, read: “intentionally and sadistically … torture, sodomization … orgy of depravity … raped with a knife … break their spirit.”

Israel did not respond to questions about the toddler.

After the U.S. sanctions on Albanese were announced, she had one month to cut ties with the U.S.

Severing those ties would prove difficult.

She had lived in Washington D.C. for three years starting in 2012, where she and her husband still kept an apartment. They had been, in many ways, a typical family of the U.S. capital’s itinerant international elite. Her husband, Massimiliano Cali, is an Italian economist at the World Bank; Albanese had joined the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University as an affiliated scholar and volunteered teaching yoga in a homeless shelter.

Facing the imminent freezing of their assets, they decided to sell the flat. “It was painful,” she said. It was where the older of their two daughters was born in 2013. It was where they returned whenever Cali needed to visit the Bank’s headquarters. They had just paid off the mortgage and much of their personal wealth was tied up in the apartment. Within days, she said, a buyer came forward offering a fair price, knowing they were in trouble. Then the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control killed the sale.

Since 2021, the family has lived in Tunis, where Cali had been posted by the Bank. The lawsuit filed in the district court in Washington in February by Cali and Albanese’s 13-year-old eldest daughter — Albanese is unable to bring suit herself under U.N. rules — enumerates the impacts of the sanctions on the family: Not only has the U.S. blocked them from their property, but banks have frozen Albanese’s accounts. Transactions involving her are stopped because intermediaries, such as Stripe, are American. Her health insurance has halted payments. Hotels have canceled bookings in her name.

She lives as a “financial outcast,” she said. She hides her identity, surviving on cash and the goodwill of friends and family. “If I were alone, I would be utterly, utterly screwed,” she said.

She had to tell her researchers at Columbia University, which provided her U.N. office with student assistants, that continuing to work with her would place them in legal jeopardy. Georgetown closed her email account. (“Institutions are prohibited by federal law from affiliating with individuals subject to U.S. sanctions,” said a Georgetown spokesperson.)

Evenher speaking appearances outside the United Statesare frequently cancelled on legal advice — or without any explanation at all. Experts she had communicated with in the course of her work told her their lawyers had advised them not to speak with her. In Signal chats, she watched as friends and collaborators quietly exited groups with her in them.

Cali worries for Albanese’s safety, she said. There have been creepy incidents. A passport in a hotel room, moved to a part of the room she hadn’t used. Broken glass evenly and carefully spread across the front doorstep of her home in Tunis — just where she stands barefoot every morning to wave her kids off to school. (Albanese did not make her husband available for this story.)

She said she’d heard from contacts “close to the Trump administration” who encouraged her to resign quietly, urging her to think about the toll this was taking on her family. (The White House did not respond to a request to comment on this.) The U.S. has barred Albanese and Cali from entering the country. This means their daughter, who is an American citizen but a minor, can’t realistically return to the land of her birth. It also means Cali has become the sole breadwinner and cannot set foot in World Bank HQ. Despite occasional grumbles from the kids who miss her as she travels constantly, she said, the family is steadfastly behind her.

Their oldest daughter faces additional legal uncertainty, her lawsuit claims. U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order, on which the sanctions rest, makes it illegal for Americans to exchange “funds, goods, or services” with listed people. Albanese fears an overzealous prosecutor might pursue her teenaged daughter over a Christmas gift or a cup of coffee. OFAC, in a response to the filing, said it had created a parental exemption for transactions that are “essential to the maintenance” of their daughter. That could include, for example, school fees for the American school she attends in Tunis.

OFAC said Christmas gifts were also fine.

Albanese sees herself as the victim of a campaign to silence her — a sense that is fueled by the intensity of the U.S. response.

The targeting of a U.N. official was like “nothing that ever happened in the 18-plus years I was in the department and likely violates our own freedom of speech laws,” said one former State Department diplomat, granted anonymity to candidly discuss U.S. government policy. (The U.N. said there had been previous cases of the U.S. sanctioning its officials.)

A key part of that campaign has been allegations that her views on Israel are grounded in antisemitism.

When I raised this issue with Albanese, she was ready with a dismissal.

“The religion Israel professes cannot be used as an excuse to murder or torture children, right?” she said. “And the legitimate fight against antisemitism cannot be weaponized against those who ask for justice for those children.” Accounts from Gazan hospital workers, published by POLITICO Magazine, detailed credible allegations that Israeli soldiers have targeted children. The Israel Defense Forces have said they have sought to minimize harm to civilians.

Advocacy groups and watchdog organizations have collected Albanese’s statements and amplified them along with claims that she is perpetuating hatred and distrust of Jews, delegitimizing Israel and diminishing the Holocaust by comparing Israel’s killings in Gaza to the Nazis’ industrialized extermination effort. Antisemitic incidents and attacks have surged in Europe and the U.S. since Israel’s invasion of Gaza, according to Jewish groups.

Among her most active detractors are Geneva-based UN Watch, a pro-Israel NGO, and the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish advocacy organization in New York. They say her comments have repeatedly exceeded the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism.

This includes her telling Palestinians, including Hamas, during a 2022 event, “You have a right to resist this occupation,” and her description of the Oct. 7 attack not as an act of antisemitism but as having been carried out “in reaction to Israel’s oppression.” Among the most frequently cited is a reference in a 2014 Facebook post to a “Jewish lobby,” a term that recalled racist theories about global Jewish conspiracies. She has since said those comments were “infelicitous, analytically inaccurate and unintendedly offensive.”

In a more recent example, she indicated her agreement with a post that placed a photo of Netanyahu’s welcome in the U.S. Congress in 2024 beside one of Adolf Hitler being greeted by cheering members of the Nazi party, along with an exhortation to learn the lessons of history. “That is more than just bad taste,” said Marina Rosenberg, a former Israeli ambassador now the senior vice president of international affairs at the ADL. “It diminishes the tragedy and the horrors of the Holocaust.”

Albanese sees the attacks on her as part of an effort to whitewash crimes happening in Gaza — a view shared by 50 progressive Jewish groups in a letter supporting her in December 2024. This is a well-worn playbook, according to multiple academic studies, in-depth reportage and several books, that pro-Israel groups use to discredit critics of Israel.

“I am sensitive and utterly committed to preserving the memory of past crimes and injustices,” she said. “But … I do not think this is the time to center our attention on the Israelis, their sensitivity only, and those who support them.”

Still, her provocations have fueled her opponents’ attacks. In February, speaking at an event organized by Al Jazeera, she denounced what she described as a global system of oppression that is both enabling the violence in Gaza and more broadly undermining accountability and self-determination for people across the world, a theme she returns to often.

“We who do not control large amounts of financial capitals, algorithms and weapons. We now see that we, as a humanity, have a common enemy,” she said.

Though the full version showed she was not referring to Israel — a point she later publicly clarified — a video posted by Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, was spliced in a way that made it seem as if it was.

(Neuer said UN Watch had simply cut two parts of the tape together, but denied it was misleading. “Both Israeli and Arab audiences understood her remarks to be pointing at Israel,” he said. “What she meant is also underscored by her prior remarks.”)

Neuer’s version of the video exploded across the internet and into European politics. French Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs Jean-Noël Barrot condemned the “outrageous and reprehensible remarks” in a speech to the French Parliament calling for her resignation. Germany, Italy, Austria and the Czech Republic also called for her to step down. (Albanese can only be removed by a majority vote in the 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council — where she has enough support, especially among developing countries, to beat back any vote.)

A group of Albanese’s fellow U.N. special rapporteurs released a statement criticizing attacks by Barrot and others as “rooted in disinformation.” The French foreign minister’s spokesperson doubled down, posting a series of her past comments that closely mirrored an online compilation of Albanese’s public statements by the ADL.

When U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced the sanctions on Albanese last summer, he said she had “spewed unabashed antisemitism, expressed support for terrorism, and open contempt for the United States, Israel, and the West.”

But none of these were the final trigger for the move, said a former senior White House official familiar with the development of the sanctions who was granted anonymity as they were not authorized to speak publicly.

That came in April and May 2025, when Albanese wrote letters to 48 companies, universities and financial institutions notifying them that, in her view, they were complicit in and profiting from a genocide. She said she was planning to name them in an upcoming report.

The letters went to a Who’s Who of U.S. capitalism — Alphabet, Lockheed Martin, BlackRock, Chevron, Palantir and Caterpillar among them. The companies listed above either did not respond to questions, called Albanese’s allegations “categorically false” (Palantir’s response), deferred questions about military sales to the U.S. government (Lockheed Martin) or highlighted their compliance with strict due diligence requirements (BlackRock).

Only one of Albanese’s letters, sent to the Norwegian finance minister regarding investments by the country’s pension fund, is publicly available. In it, Albanese laid out the legal and moral jeopardy of continuing to do business in Israel and warned that “to knowingly assist, aid or abet the illegal Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory through trade or investment may constitute war crimes under international law.”

Catching wind of the letters, Trump officials reached out, informally, to people they knew at major U.S. corporations. Had they received a threatening note? As the answers came back, the scale and audacity of her move began to dawn, said the former White House official.

“That a U.N. official is antisemitic or anti-Israel is not making the 10 o’clock news. That’s just typical of the U.N.,” the former White House official said. “Starting to move against American companies and executives and threatening them — that is not usual.”

Some of the companies contacted by the White House said they were planning to ignore the letter. At least two companies asked the administration for help, Reuters has reported. The former senior White House official said the companies calling for aid were from industries at the heart of the Trump agenda: energy, technology and AI innovation.

The administration approached the office of the U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres to ask whether Albanese’s role at the U.N. granted her immunity from sanctions.

The letter that came back has never been made public, but both the former White House official and Albanese said they had seen it. They said it left enough ambiguity for the U.S. to go forward with the sanctions. “The Secretary General in writing told the administration that she in fact acts in her own personal capacity and attempted to distance the U.N. from her,” said the former White House official. Albanese said she felt betrayed and called it “one of the lowest moments for the U.N. in general.”

After the sanctions were in place, Guterres “formally protested to the U.S. Government,” said Stéphane Dujarric, a spokesperson for the secretary-general. Regarding the earlier letter, Dujarric said: “Our position is clear. In her activities as a Special Rapporteur, Ms. Albanese is covered by immunity.” He noted that as an appointee of the U.N.’s Human Rights Council, she was not accountable to Guterres.

When Albanese’s report was released in early July, it named all of the companies and included a recommendation that the ICC in The Hague and national judiciaries “investigate and prosecute corporate executives and/or corporate entities for their part in the commission of international crimes and laundering of the proceeds from those crimes.”

She was, according to the former White House official, “basically in a conspiracy to kidnap Americans and take them hostage to The Hague. That is the logical conclusion of where she is trying to go. And that merits a very strong response.”

The link with the ICC gave the White House grounds to act. The Trump administration had created a legal framework to sanction judges at the ICC after the court issued the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant. Now the U.S. added Albanese to that list.

Asked to comment, the State Department said in an emailed statement: “Our sanctions are legal, appropriate, and necessary. Her so-called ‘reports’ targeting American workers and their livelihoods from farms to factories show a deep-seated bias against American economic sovereignty, and have no basis in reality or fact, and distract from the very real work the UN does to help people, particularly in humanitarian settings.”

The first hearing in her court case is expected to take place on Wednesday, when Judge Richard J. Leon, a George W. Bush appointee, will decide whether to temporarily lift the sanctions while the court considers the matter.

Lawyers representing Albanese’s family noted she has no formal link with the ICC. “Francesca’s work is her voice,” they wrote. In their pre-hearing response to the suit, the administration’s lawyers said that as a foreign national living abroad, Albanese is not protected by the First Amendment and that by calling for U.S. executives to be referred to the ICC, Albanese was wielding more than words.

“Maybe she wanted it to happen. Didn’t care. Wants to be a martyr. Whatever,” said the former White House official. “That doesn’t mean that we don’t have a responsibility to defend our interests.”

At the U.N. campus in Geneva, it was snowing. In a nondescript meeting room, Albanese laid her keffiyeh, the checkered scarf worn by Palestinians, on a heater to dry and slumped again in her chair. Visits to the U.N. drain her, she said.

She was looking forward to eventually going home where she would reconnect with her family. She has begun compiling evidence for her next report, which will detail how the world’s media failed Gaza — poking the bear again, this time in its third eye.

Her life, she says, has been almost entirely consumed by her mission. On Monday it was her 49th birthday. It was also Land Day, a day of commemoration for displaced Palestinians. The scale of the nightmare in Gaza and the West Bank is vast. It is her job to somehow absorb and relay it to the rest of the world. That costs her profoundly — more than any American sanctions.

“I’m not Palestinian but you do not need to be Palestinian to feel the pain these people are experiencing,” she said. “It is tough to resist so much violence and remain gracious and human.”

Daniella Cheslow contributed reporting from Washington.