Francesa Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, speaks at a conference, “A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza,” at the Roma Tre University, in Rome, Italy, Oct. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Remo Casilli

United Nations Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese has walked back claims that Jews in Nazi concentration camps were called “Muslims.”

Albanese, who has a mandate from the UN to advise the international body on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, first made the comments while commenting on the origins of antisemitism during an interview with the Latin American and Caribbean Confederation of State Workers (CLATE).

“When the term ‘antisemitism’ was first coined, it referred to anyone who wasn’t European and came from the Middle East … in reality, the concept of antisemitism is broader,” she said.

“In fact, when they were taken to the gas chambers, there are some testimonies about life in the concentration camps that mention how Jews were referred to as ‘Muslims,'” she continued.

Hillel Neuer, the CEO of UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO, issued a statement repudiating Albanese’s comments as uninformed and distortionary.

“Francesca Albanese in this interview is not explaining antisemitism; she is completely rewriting its meaning, and in the process distorting the history of the Holocaust. Her remarks reveal astonishing ignorance, and malice,” he posted on social media,

Amid an onslaught of backlash over her comments, which critics argued were tantamount to Holocaust distortion, Albanese issued a subsequent statement apologizing and clarifying that antisemitism refers to Jews alone.

“I sincerely apologize. I misread the term ‘Muselmann’ (Muslim) used in Nazi camps for prisoners at the brink of death, wrongly inferring that the term antisemitism originally meant hatred of all Semitic peoples,” she posted on X on Monday. “In fact, it was coined specifically to denote hatred of Jews.”

The term “antisemitism” was coined in the late 19th century and generally attributed to German journalist and political agitator Wilhelm Marr, who used the German term Antisemitismus in the 1870s to describe hostility toward Jews. Although “Semitic” referred to a linguistic category including to languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, Marr and others deliberately used it as a racial designation for Jews, helping frame anti-Jewish prejudice as a form of racial or ethnic hostility rather than simply religious opposition. This modern conception built upon much older forms of anti-Jewish hatred and prejudice.

Albanese, an Italian lawyer and academic, has held the position of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories since 2022. The position authorizes her to monitor and report on alleged “human rights violations” that Israel supposedly commits against Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.

In the months following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities across southern Israel, Albanese accused the Jewish state of enacting a “genocide” against the Palestinian people as revenge for the attacks and circulated a widely derided and heavily disputed report alleging that 186,000 people had been killed in the Gaza war as a result of Israeli actions.

The United Nations launched a probe into Albanese in the summer of 2024 for allegedly accepting a trip to Australia funded by pro-Hamas organizations. She has also celebrated the anti-Israel protesters rampaging across US college campuses at the time, saying they represented a “revolution” and gave her “hope.”

The UN adviser has also decried Israelis as “foreign” Jews who expelled “indigenous” Palestinians from their land for the purpose of creating an exclusionary ethnostate, erasing the millennia-long presence of Jewish people within the land of Israel. She has also repeatedly condemned Israel as a “colonial” enterprise, comparing the Jewish state to British India or French Algeria.

Albanese recently found herself embroiled in controversy after calling for the West to cease sending military aid to Ukraine as the country continued to defend its territory from Russian invasion. The comments, made at the Festival di Open in Parma, Italy, on Sept. 19, suggested that the ongoing war in Ukraine serves a broader geopolitical interest in keeping Europe weak.