‘Impunity won’t last forever’: What gives Francesca Albanese hope
UN rapporteur on Palestine, Francesca Albanese, speaks during the opening of The Hague Group summit in Bogota, 15 July 2025
Samah Salaime writes in +972 on 21 January 2026:
Midway through Francesca Albanese’s recent lecture at SOAS University of London, the young man sitting next to me in the audience quietly began to cry. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories had been speaking about the role of international law at a time of genocide, but the man was no longer paying attention.
I asked him if he was okay and handed him a tissue. He told me that he’s a doctor from Gaza, and that he left the Strip with his wife (also a doctor) in the early months of the war.
Then I learned the reason for his tears. In December 2023, when the Israeli army ordered the evacuation of his neighborhood in northern Gaza, his family gathered their belongings and boarded a truck to escape. But while they did so, he ran to his in-laws’ house to collect his wife, whom he had recently married. “Everyone got on the truck except me — my father, mother, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, and their children,” he told me. “Before I got back, they were all killed in a single airstrike. I survived by chance. Everyone died. I have no one.”
I stopped listening to the distinguished speaker and the irritating questions from disgruntled audience members and continued speaking with the doctor, whose name, he told me, was Abdallah. “My mother was your age,” he said. “You look like her. She was so proud that I finished medical school.” He cried again, and I cried with him.
Abdallah and his wife left Gaza through Egypt. She received a PhD scholarship; he will begin his residency in the UK. It took him two years to receive permission to work here as a doctor. Ahead of them, I hope, is a new life.
“You have to go and speak to her,” I told him when Albanese finished her lecture. He refused. “She’s probably heard many stories like mine. She even wrote a book about it.” “It doesn’t matter,” I insisted. “You have to tell her your story. You are the person she’s talking about to people here in London.”
From that moment, the young man lost control of his body. I dragged him up the stairs, pushing through the crowd surrounding Albanese. “You have to meet Abdallah, this young man from Gaza,” I said loudly, as if we were childhood friends.
Abdallah shook her hand, visibly shaken, and spoke. She listened, hugged him, and said: “Don’t be silent. You must tell your story everywhere. This is your mission because no one will do it for Palestinians, not even me. Speaking and sharing helps you heal your wounds and cope with grief, and it helps the world understand and not forget.”