Navi Pillay has won the 2026 Nobel Peace Prize.
I know her best from her time as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 2008 to 2014. But she had a long history of human rights work in her native South Africa, where she served as a lawyer defending key members of the anti-apartheid movement, including Nelson Mandela. She also served as a judge at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which tried perpetrators of the 1994 genocide.
But it’s her more recent work investigating atrocities committed during the war in Gaza that likely convinced the Nobel Committee to confer this honor upon her when it did.
Pillay chaired a UN Commission of Inquiry into human rights abuses committed in Israel and Palestine that produced a series of exhaustive reports on violations committed by both Israel and Hamas in the context of the Gaza war. These reports are extremely detailed, and often quite gruesome.
In September 2025, the Commission issued a legal analysis of its factual findings and concluded that the war crimes and crimes against humanity it had documented over the previous two years amounted to genocide. That is, the Commission concluded that these crimes met the threshold of intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular national, ethnic, racial, or religious group that distinguishes genocide from other mass atrocities.
“It is clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention,” Pillay said upon the release of the report.
“The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons who have orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza. The Commission also finds that Israel has failed to prevent and punish the commission of genocide, through failure to investigate genocidal acts and to prosecute alleged perpetrators.”
So, when you sometimes hear that “the UN” has said Israel committed genocide in Gaza, this is the report people are referring to. Pillay chaired the Commission that produced it.
Israel, naturally, rejected the report’s findings and dismissed allegations of genocide as an antisemitic blood libel, referring to the medieval antisemitic trope that Jews use the blood of non-Jews in religious ceremonies. (We don’t! It really is just red wine.)
In the few hours since the Nobel announcement, the Israeli government has pulled from that familiar playbook, accusing Pillay of bias and blasting the Nobel Committee.
“The Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass,” reads a statement from Netanyahu’s office. “It has awarded its highest honor to a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the one and only Jewish state.”
On Twitter, Israel’s ambassador to the UN asked, “What comes next? Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Hamas and al-Qaeda terrorists? This disgraceful decision is an insult to the Nobel Peace Prize, its values, and the legacy of leaders who dedicated their lives to achieving genuine peace.”
Israel’s denunciation of both Pillay and the Nobel Committee is not unexpected. It fits a broader pattern in which the Israeli government attacks the credibility of individuals and institutions that criticize Israel, rather than reckoning with why its own actions have attracted such widespread international condemnation in the first place.
But in honoring Pillay, the Nobel Committee has effectively called Israel’s bluff. The Committee was no doubt aware of the attacks Israel has repeatedly leveled against Pillay. Rather than being deterred, the Committee strategically chose to bestow upon her one of the world’s most prestigious honors, elevating her stature and lending even greater moral authority to her work. In doing so, the Committee has undermined the very campaign to discredit her.
Israel has spent years trying to demonize Pillay. Now, it must contend with the possibility that those very denunciations helped her win the Nobel Peace Prize.