Netanyahu calls Nobel laureate Pillay a bigot after 2026 prize

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Nobel Peace Prize laureate Navi Pillay a bigot on 10 October 2026, a day after the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded her the 2026 prize. The committee gave Pillay the award on 9 October 2026 for her efforts to promote peace and international law. Netanyahu's office said the committee had lost its moral compass.foreignpolicy.com+1

The award matters because Pillay chaired a United Nations commission of inquiry that concluded Israel committed genocide in Gaza, a finding Israel has rejected. Her prize puts a jurist at the centre of a dispute between Israel, the United States and the international courts they have targeted. The reaction from both governments arrived within a day of the announcement.trtworld.com

What the committee awarded

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said Pillay held states and national leaders accountable, brought hope to victims of violence and conflict, and demonstrated a firm moral compass throughout her long career. The committee noted a common thread running from her early work defending Nelson Mandela and others who stood up against apartheid to her service as a judge in key international court cases.

Netanyahu's Prime Minister's Office posted on X/Twitter that the committee had awarded its highest honour to a bigot who built her career around inventing and propagating blood libels against the only Jewish state. The post said Pillay's proudest achievement was to legitimize a corrupt prosecutor, referring to International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan.

Pillay led a team of independent experts last year to determine whether Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. The team concluded that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention, and that responsibility for the atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons. Israel refused to cooperate with the investigation.

Where the genocide finding came from

The commission, officially called the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory including east Jerusalem, drew sharp criticism from Israel. Israel's Foreign Ministry accused Pillay of promoting lies, hatred and blood libels, and rejected her genocide allegations as the biggest lie of the 21st century. The United States pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council in response to the commission's work.

Hours after the Nobel announcement, the Trump administration imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court on 9 October 2026. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the United States would ban transactions with what he called a rogue court, cutting off its resources. ICC Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan said the sanctions must be condemned and that the court's work would continue.

Pillay responded to the sanctions from Nuremberg on 10 October 2026, speaking by video link to an event at the Nobel Peace Centre in Oslo. She said sanctions announced by one country against judges, just for the judicial orders they issue, are unheard of and unacceptable. She added that hundreds of staff in the International Criminal Court feel they are under threat.

How the United States responded

Pillay, 85, learned of her award while attending a forum in Nuremberg, Germany, where the Nazi criminal trials were held. She said efforts to weaken international criminal justice endanger the progress painstakingly made since Nuremberg and risk returning the world to a place where power, rather than law, determines whose suffering matters. She sits as a judge on the International Court of Justice in a case accusing Myanmar of genocide.

US President Donald Trump also criticised the prize at a campaign rally in Syracuse, New York, saying the Nobel Prize was given to a liberal person who works at the United Nations and that he had never heard of that person. He said the United States, represented by him as president, should have received the prize, and called the decision a disgraceful and embarrassing one for Norway.oneindia.com

The dispute now runs through three institutions at once: the Norwegian Nobel Committee that honoured Pillay, the International Criminal Court under new US sanctions, and the UN commission whose Gaza findings both Israel and the United States reject. Pillay told the Oslo event that there is so much tension and anxiety over the continued existence of international courts, mainly the International Criminal Court in The Hague.