The Absent Present: Volker Türk and Israel’s Genocide in Gaza

20 February 2026

Since October 2022, Volker Türk has been serving as the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. He reached this position after a long career at the United Nations as an administrator and humanitarian with the United Nations Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, which views its minor and distinct colleague, not to say competitor for resources, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency or Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), with vague suspicion and absolute lack of historical understanding.

For decades, Palestinians have been trying to resort to various United Nations functions to advance their cause for liberation, self–determination, return, and accountability against Israel’s coloniality and apartheid. Israel vehemently opposed Palestinians’ rights with the support of the United States diplomacy and its allies in the European Union and elsewhere. The Israeli paradigm followed its founder and main executer of Palestinian ethnic cleansing in 1948, David Ben – Gurion who despised the United Nations and asserted that what mattered was what Jews do on the ground and not what gentiles think. He could not have advanced this notion without knowing about the intelligence collaboration between Israel, the United States, France, Britain, and Germany.

The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) is the United Nations’ main body tasked with operating its organs, chief among them the Human Rights Council, which substituted the Commission on Human Rights in 2006. An important mechanism within OHCHR is the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, established by the Commission on Human Rights in 1993. The mandate of the special rapporteur was formed in the wake of the Palestinian uprising in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza (1987 – 1992), but did not cover the entirety of the Palestinian question. During that uprising, Israel’s regular and daily human rights violations accelerated, including violations of all relevant provisions of the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention: mass killings, systematic torture, deportations, collective arbitrary arrests and administrative detentions, and constant violation of freedom of movement.

Israel’s accusatorial terrorism of the 1990s and early 2000s shattered the fragile, justless, and Israel-centered Oslo process, culminating in another Palestinian uprising met with the familiar Israeli courageless brutality. Since 2000 OHCHR special rapporteur to the occupied Palestinian territories played a key role in articulating factual findings and making sound legal determinations. Individuals with significant relevant knowledge and experience occupied this role, granting their narration authoritative legitimacy. Mr. John Dugard of South Africa, Mr. Richard Falk of the United States, Mr. Makarim Wibisono of Indonesia, Mr. Michael Lynk of Canada, and Ms. Francesca Albanese of Italy displayed intellectual integrity, reasonableness, and a spirit to genuinely uphold the responsibility attached to their role, supported by two advisory opinions of the International Court of Justice from 2004 and 2024. All have castigated Israel’s horrendous human rights violations as illegal, applied the appropriate legal standards regarding Israel’s status as an occupying power, and found that Israel is practicing apartheid in the area of their mandate, enforced by an illegal occupation as such.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza put Mr. Volker to a difficult test, considering the powers that he needed to adjust to, given the various state groupings in the United Nations and the nature of administrators’ work in the premier international agency. Although he voiced humanitarian concern about the deteriorating situation in Gaza and called for an investigation of all parties involved, Volker nevertheless left the impression that he was uncomfortable with the burden he was placed under. Of all United Nations officials who expressed an opinion on Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, his was the mildest void of any legal significance. Not only has he declined to describe Israel’s international crimes as genocide despite the pleadings of his staff and the overwhelming evidence, but he also failed to subscribe to any legal definition regarding Israel’s conduct other than the abstract humanitarian declarations about his noteworthy worry.

Volker’s performance during Israel’s genocide in Gaza is a lesson about the limited nature of human rights discourse. Despite the clear case in support of the Palestinian side, a central United Nations human rights official could not express it clearly at a decisive historical moment. He was not required to apply critical theory or analysis, nor was he asked to expose the character of Israeli Jewish society and its practices of concealment. Rather, he was supposed simply to state the facts and the law. His caution is understandable. His failure, however, is condemnable and should constitute a warning alert for proponents of Palestinian rights and, if necessary, to our shared humanity.  

Volker Türk, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. Source: Reuters, 17 October 2022.