South Africa's Navi Pillay wins the Nobel Peace Prize, and Israel is furious

"Disgraceful."

That was Israel's first word on Friday. The 2026 Nobel Peace Prize had just gone to Navi Pillay, an 85-year-old judge from Durban.

South Africans cheered. Online, people wrote "a South African, say it" and "well deserved". Others predicted that Israel's backers and Donald Trump would be furious.

Israel did not wait long to prove the first part right.

Why is Israel angry that Navi Pillay won the Nobel Peace Prize?

Because of Gaza.

From 2021, Pillay chaired the UN commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory. In September 2025 it concluded that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza. It also said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, President Isaac Herzog and former defence minister Yoav Gallant had incited genocide, The Guardian reports.

Israel refused to work with the commission. It called the report "scandalous".

So when Oslo picked Pillay, Israel's diplomats hit back hard. Its ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Daniel Meron, told Reuters the decision was "disgraceful". He also called Pillay herself a supporter of antisemitism.

Israel's foreign ministry went further on X. It said that if there were an award for lies and hatred, she would be a frontrunner. It called the prize the "grotesque weaponization" of an award to legitimise anti-Israel hatred.

Who said what about Navi Pillay's Nobel Prize?

Here is every major reaction in one place, from the first hours after the announcement.

The split could not be sharper. To Israel's government, she is the face of a lie. To most of the rest, she is a judge who did her job.

What did Navi Pillay say about Gaza?

She did not back down.

Pillay heard the news in Nuremberg, Germany, at a gathering of international lawyers. Speaking to a cheering crowd, she brought up Gaza herself.

"The last thing I did is the delivery of the report on Gaza, naming what's happening there as genocide," she said, in a clip shared by the head of Amnesty International.

Then she turned the praise around. People had called her brave for that report, she said, and she was surprised. "Why would you need courage to speak the truth?" You look at the facts and the law, she added, and you make an impartial decision.

Fitting, perhaps. She spoke in the city where Nazi leaders were put on trial after World War II. Pillay said it was "perhaps meant to be".

Her Gaza work is not the end of the fight. Israel is still at odds with the international courts, and Pillay's old court, the ICC, has issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu. Our story on how Israelis are voting after 7 October shows how raw the war still is at home.

Photo: Ludovic Courtès / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0

What was Navi Pillay's joke about Trump?

Then came the line that went around the world.

As the crowd in Nuremberg kept clapping, Pillay smiled. "If you clap a little bit more, I may share this prize with Trump," she said. The room laughed.

The joke had a target. Last year's winner, Venezuela's María Corina Machado, gave her own Nobel medal to Trump in January. Trump had said openly that he deserved the prize. Leaders of Israel, Pakistan and Cambodia said they had nominated him, CNN reports. This week he said he did not think he would win.

He did not. Pillay beat 287 candidates to the prize he wanted so badly.

There was no White House reaction to her joke in the reports we saw.

Who is Navi Pillay?

She was born in 1941 into a Tamil Indian family in Natal.

In 1967 she became the first woman to open a law practice in Natal, Reuters reports. Under apartheid she defended anti-apartheid activists and exposed torture. She helped win key rights for prisoners on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was held.

After apartheid she became the first non-white woman on South Africa's High Court. Then the world called.

At the UN tribunal for Rwanda, she helped establish that rape and sexual violence can be acts of genocide. The Nobel committee called her influence on that ruling a significant factor.

She went on to judge at the International Criminal Court and to lead the UN's human rights office. Today she sits as a judge at the International Court of Justice in the case that accuses Myanmar of genocide.

Photo: Moheen Reeyad / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

How many South Africans have won the Nobel Peace Prize?

Five, now. Pillay is the fifth South African to win it, Reuters reports.

Every one of them was honoured for a fight that started under apartheid. Pillay is the first woman on the list.

"She has served humanity with principle and the belief that the world can and should be a better place," President Ramaphosa said. The University of KwaZulu-Natal, where she studied law, said it was proudly celebrating its old student.

What happens next?

Pillay will collect the medal, a diploma and 12 million Swedish crowns, about $1.2 million, in Oslo on 10 December.

She has already chosen who it is for. She dedicated it to "all the survivors of international crimes", and to the people who fight for international justice.

Israel called it disgraceful. The lawyer who started out defending apartheid's prisoners will walk into Oslo City Hall anyway. She will stand where Luthuli, Tutu and Mandela stood before her.

And she will bring the question she asked in Nuremberg, the one Israel cannot stand: "Why would you need courage to speak the truth?"