The resignations come less than a week after the Trump administration sanctioned U.N. Palestinian rights envoy Francesca Albanese
All three commissioners leading the United Nations’ anti-Israel inquisition panel resigned this week, just days after the State Department sanctioned a pro-Hamas U.N. investigator.
The U.N. Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory’s chairwoman Navi Pillay, commissioner Miloon Kothari, and commissioner Chris Sidoti all announced they are stepping down, according to the watchdog group U.N. Watch.
The exodus comes less than a week after Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced U.S. sanctions against U.N. special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories Francesca Albanese for her “illegitimate and shameful efforts to prompt [International Criminal Court] action against U.S. and Israeli officials, companies, and executives.”
Albanese, as the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this month, wrote “threatening letters” to a variety of companies across the globe in which she warned them to cut business ties with Israel or face “potential criminal liability.”
The mass departure could mark the end of the U.N. Commission of Inquiry, founded after a request from the Palestinian delegation and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation in 2021 to probe the “root causes” of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Supporters of Israel have accused the commission of extreme bias, noting that the appointed leaders have called Israel an “apartheid” state and accused Jews of controlling the media.
While Pillay attributed her resignation to “age, medical issues, and the weight of several other commitments,” U.N. Watch welcomed the departures and said the “architects of the U.N.’s anti-Israel inquisition are fleeing the ship.”
“The resignation of all three commissioners is long overdue,” U.N. Watch executive director Hillel Neuer said in a statement. “This was a commission born in prejudice—designed to target Israel, while ignoring Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Palestinian Authority. Its members were selected precisely for their hostility to the Jewish state.”
The hostility Neuer referenced includes Pillay’s accusation of “apartheid” against Israel and Kothari’s claim that social media is “controlled largely by the Jewish lobby.”
Albanese, the sanctioned U.N. official, has also minimized Hamas terrorism, accused the CIA and Mossad of orchestrating the 2015 terrorist attack by ISIS in Paris, and said the United States is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.”