Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories and two Gaza Doctors, Dr. Hassam Abu Safiya and Dr. Sara Al-Saqqa, have been nominated for the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize. Nearly 300 qualified proposers from 33 countries signed the petition, including countries from the West and the Global South.
More than anyone today, they deserve this prestigious peace prize for laboring with inestimable integrity and courage to gain a Palestinian-led peace in Gaza and the West Bank amidst a genocide perpetrated by Israel. For Albanese’s unrelenting and unsparing critique of Israel’s genocide and the 63 countries she identified profiting from genocide by selling weapons and weapon parts, and other economic deals with Israel, Francesca Albanese stands head and shoulders with the great Nobel-Prize women. Women such as Jane Adams who won the prize for her persistent, lifelong dedication to international peace beginning with World War 1; Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmental, political and women’s rights activist, who founded the Green Belt Movement; and 17-year-old Malala Yousafzai who risked her life in confronting the Pakistani Taliban’s suppression of girls and championed the equal right of girls all over the world to education.
Speaking in a press briefing before the UN in 2025, Albanese called the genocide of mostly women and children civilians and record numbers of journalists, health workers and UN staff “The Shame of Our Time.” Since 2023 Israel has killed more than 70,600 people (some scholars place it at more than 112,000), 75 percent being women and children, and injured over 171,000 others in attacks in Gaza. More than 85 percent of Gaza is in ruins, including homes, shelters, hospitals, schools and mosques; and the destruction and death has not ceased throughout the Trump’s phony, grift con the century peace deal signed in October 2025.
Albanese observes that there is something different about today’s genocide. “It’s openly incited, cynically denied, and relentlessly supported, armed, and weaponized while those who oppose it are silenced, beaten, criminalized, and smeared.” This collective crime embodies the “collapse of the international legal order” for the Palestinians and for all of us. States making money off genocide are primarily Western so-called democracies, but there are also some from the Global South and some Arab states. Albanese was “shocked to see how much the Israel stock exchange had gone up during the genocide.” They battle-test their weapons on Palestinians and sell to Europe primarily but also to India, some Arab and Global South countries. And questioning so-called world leaders (prime ministers, presidents, and so on), she asks: “How do you sleep?” You actively comply, she asserted, to support Israel in its complete erasure of Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank.
We, ordinary citizens are in a perilous place, she observes: the system run by governments has heightened authoritarian qualities. So-called democratic Western countries are arresting and persecuting those who oppose Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. Albanese calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israeli companies that are silent and/or profit while Israel commits genocide. “Palestine today is a metaphor of our life and where our life is going to go” unless we resist.
To her credit, she holds out hope: the millions of trade unions, dockworkers, students, mothers and fathers and “ordinary people everywhere” who are refusing to be complicit in genocide of Palestinians, in Israel’s apartheid of Palestinians. These include the dockworkers in more than 20 ports across the Mediterranean in early February 2026 who launched a strike to protest against war and rearmament in solidarity with Palestine. “The future of millions demand is one of justice, equality, and freedom, and is still within reach if we act now.”
Francesca Albanese, a beacon of truth-telling, under great political pressure and sanctioned by Israel and the US, and Dr. Hassam Abu Safiya and Dr. Sara Al-Saqqa who risk their lives daily to save Gazan lives, must win the Nobel Peace Prize to demonstrate that integrity still survives.
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