The Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to a South African judge who led the UN panel that accused Israel of genocide. The Telegraph has more.
Navanethem ‘Navi’ Pillay was chosen because she represents “the rule of law” and has been instrumental in “ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted”, the Norwegian Nobel committee said.
The award is likely to be viewed as a rebuke to Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has rejected the findings of Pillay’s commission and fiercely criticised the UN.
Israel responded furiously, saying the award would “legitimise anti-Israel hatred”.
“If there were an award for lies, hatred and blood libels, Navi Pillay wouldn’t just be a contender. She’d be a frontrunner,” the Foreign Ministry wrote on X.
The 85 year-old jurist had not been informed that she was this year’s peace prize winner, and gave an impromptu speech outside the Nuremberg courthouse where Nazi leaders were put on trial after the Second World War.
She denied it was “courageous” to declare Israel guilty of genocide in 2025, saying: “Why would you need courage to speak the truth? You interpret the law, you look at all the facts, so it’s an impartial decision.”
At the award ceremony in Oslo, the Chairman of the Norwegian Nobel committee was asked why Pillay’s Gaza ruling had not been mentioned in the speech announcing her victory.
“It’s an important part of her recent work,” Jorgen Watne Frydnes replied, adding that she had been recognised for everything she had done from the start of a “long career” to her “present-day work”. He then abruptly ended the press conference.
Born in Durban under apartheid, Pillay defended Nelson Mandela before serving as a judge on the International Criminal Tribunal which convicted perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide.
The 85 year-old was later the UN’s most senior human rights official from 2008 to 2014. In 2021, she was appointed Chairman of the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, a group of external experts charged with investigating abuses on both sides of the conflict.
In 2025, the commission declared that Israel had committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, after Hamas’s massacre on October 7th 2023. The report had no legal force and was fiercely disputed by Israel.
Writing in the New York Times, Pillay said: “The scale of the destruction is devastating… our analysis found that starvation has been used as a weapon of war and that the medical system has been deliberately destroyed.”
“Children have been starved, shot and buried under rubble. … These are not the accidents of war. They are acts calculated to bring about the destruction of a people.”
In order to establish whether a genocide has taken place, the “intent” to do must be clear, Pillay wrote. The “evidence is clear” on that count, she said.
“Senior Israeli leaders, including the president, the prime minister and the former defence minister have dehumanised Palestinians… [and] their words have been matched by deeds,” including indiscriminate bombing and the blocking of humanitarian aid.
Only the International Court of Justice can formally declare genocide, and South Africa’s legal suit against Israel in that forum remains ongoing.
Pillay’s commission argued that it would take too long to come to a verdict and states needed to act sooner to uphold their duty to prevent genocide.
Israel categorically rejected the commission’s “false and distorted” report and accused Pillay and the other authors of “serving as Hamas proxies”.
“The report relies entirely on Hamas falsehoods, laundered and repeated by others. These fabrications have already been thoroughly debunked,” said Israel’s Foreign Ministry.
“In stark contrast to the lies in the report, Hamas is the party that attempted genocide in Israel – murdering 1,200 people, raping women, burning families alive and openly declaring its goal of killing every Jew.”
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The Nobel committee, like so many international bodies, seems to have been devalued in recent years. What has happened to objectivity and balance.
No surprise. For the past 20-30 years the left have infiltrated international quangos and “charities” as effectively as national (sic) ones.
One thought the Norwegians were politically a bit too idealistic, but now what has gone wrong with them. Another country not to visit; or is it hopefully an aberration until the next election
Sad to say, The Nobel Prize Committee is an Institution, and ergo it has been colonised. The more we shrug institutions off as irrelevant, the more irrelevant they will become.
Problem is that in the UK, Tony Blair handed over control and administration of country to institutions like quangos with huge taxpayer funded budgets and no accountability.
Look at that photo of the Tamil “Judge” Naidoo, who at first reminded me of Gollum, but then I realized Gollum was better looking. See the face of the Voracious Indian Predator Hordes who have used Africa as a Stepping Stone to the West (she went to Harvard), first trampling upon the Ethnic Africans, as they did on the Ethnic African Fiji Islanders, then swarming into the West to trample upon the Ethnic Europeans.
It is they and their Abominable Caste System who are the real threat to Western Civilization, not the Chinese.
At least Arday had eye makeup and a shiny face.
The Nobel committee gave Obama the prize simply for being coloured and then gives Pillay the prize simply for being wrong.
Not much point to it is there.
They were both handed the prize because of their Third World Ethnicity and stupid Communist Subversion.
That’s a bit unfair. He got it for turning up.