The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded on Friday to South African judge and former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navanethem “Navi” Pillay, currently serving as an ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
Critics blasted the award as a purely political move intended to “send a message” to President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, since Pillay has denounced Israel for “genocide” in Gaza without corresponding criticism of the October 7 atrocities or the terrorists of Hamas.
If the Nobel committee was trying to infuriate the Israelis by giving the Peace Prize to a “Gaza genocide” activist just two days after the anniversary of the 10/7 attack, it succeeded.
“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 Israeli Foreign Ministry said in response to the announcement.
“Her role in the relentless, politically motivated demonization of Israel and promotion of the genoLIE speaks volumes,” the statement continued. “Awarding Pillay the Nobel Peace Prize isn’t a recognition of justice. It’s the grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice.”
“Now that the Nobel commission has rewarded the biggest lie of the 21st century, Joseph Goebbels is certainly applauding from hell,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry concluded.
“The Nobel Prize committee has lost its moral compass. 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,” said the office of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“Navi Pillay’s proudest achievement was to legitimize a corrupt prosecutor who turned to her fabrications against Israel hoping that by joining her bigoted lynch mob, he would beat a rape charge,” the Netanyahu statement continued, referring to disgraced International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor Karim Khan.
“Karim Khan, who was accused by his own ICC employees of raping and sexually molesting them, used Pillay’s lies to build a fake case against Israel. Pillay supplied the lies. Khan weaponized them,” the prime minister’s office charged.
“And now the misguided members of the Nobel Committee are honoring the woman who propagated this demonization of the Jews and this travesty of justice,” the statement exclaimed.
U.N. Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer was “shocked” at the award to Pillay, given her “troubling record on antisemitism and gross breach of ethics in presiding over a notorious U.N. commission.”
Neuer summarized the case against Pillay:
In July 2021, Ms. Pillay accepted to chair a Pakistani-sponsored U.N. Commission of Inquiry into alleged Israeli crimes. The rules of due process require that fact-finders in the human rights field be impartial. Yet prior to accepting this post, Pillay had publicly pronounced herself, in extreme terms, on the very issues that her inquiry is mandated to investigate.
In June 2020, she signed a manifesto calling on governments to “Sanction Apartheid Israel.” In June 2021, a month before heading the inquiry, Pillay wrote a letter to President Biden calling to punish Israel for the May 2021 war with Hamas. She has made many more prior prejudicial pronouncements.
Neuer noted that Pillay has also defended antisemitic comments from other international bureaucrats, and her record was toxic enough to get her disinvited from a town hall event in Berlin in 2022.
“By honoring Pillay, the Nobel committee has failed to uphold the principles it seeks to celebrate. International justice depends on impartiality. When an investigator campaigns to punish a country before examining the evidence, she compromises the credibility of both her findings and the institution she represents,” Neuer said.
Pillay, whose full name is “Navanethem,” is an 85-year-old South African who was born to an Indian Tamil family. She was an anti-apartheid lawyer early in her career and, in 1995, she became the first non-white female judge on South Africa’s highest court. She was also the first South African to receive a doctorate of law from Harvard Law School.
Pillay went on to lead an international tribunal investigating the Rwandan genocide in 1994. She was U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights between 2008 and 2014, and has served as a judge on the ICC.
Her link to the ICC led observers to speculate she was chosen for the Nobel Peace Prize as a rebuke to President Trump, as well as to Netanyahu. The Trump administration imposed sanctions against the ICC on Friday after slamming the court for unfairly harassing the U.S. and its allies, such as Israel. Neither America or Israel was a signatory to the Rome Statue, the 1998 treaty that established the ICC.
“We will ban transactions with this rogue court, cutting off their resources and crippling its ability to operate against us. The United States and the American people are not subject to the jurisdiction of this fake ICC,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio declared on Friday.
Pillay, who was in Nuremburg, Germany, and touring the famous Nuremberg Trials chamber when her Nobel Peace Prize was announced, took some digs at the U.S. and Israel in her comments on the award.
“The last thing I did is deliver the report on Gaza, naming what’s happening there as genocide,” she recalled, repeating the slander that enraged the Israelis.
“One of the main reactions to that report was paying tribute to me for my courage and you can imagine how surprised I was. Why would you need courage to speak the truth? You interpret the law, you look at all the facts, so it’s impartial decision making,” she insisted.
“We are living through an era when international law and human rights are under significant political attack. This worsening reality is particularly visible with the attacks on the International Criminal Court,” she said, turning her lash from Israel to the United States.
When the audience in Nuremberg applauded the announcement of her Nobel prize, Pillay joked: “If you clap a bit more, I may share this prize with Trump.” She was making a sarcastic reference to last year’s Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who gave her medal to Trump in a White House meeting in January 2026 to acknowledge his contributions to freedom in Venezuela.
The chair of the Nobel Peace Committee, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, told reporters the committee was not taking a stance on the Gaza “genocide” issue by presenting the Peace Prize to Pillay.
“It’s her report. Of course we have great faith in her professionalism, in her integrity, but that work is of a U.N. inquiry commission,” he said.
Frydnes also insisted the Nobel Committee is separate from the International Criminal Court, but went on to say that Pillay’s prize was meant to “remind the world that the cornerstone of a more peaceful world is strengthening international law.”
“The institutions that uphold international law are under tremendous pressure, sanctions, and attack,” he said, which was easy to read as a rebuke to the U.S. for its pressure against the ICC.