A South African lawyer with a long record in human rights work, including leading a U.N. commission that said Israel had committed genocide, won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a decision that drew Israel’s condemnation and underscored the country’s deep isolation on the world stage.

The lawyer, Navanethem Pillay, known as Navi, has worked for decades on human rights issues, defending anti-apartheid activists including later president and Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela. Over the years, she has variously served as a top U.N. official and as a judge on the International Criminal Court and a tribunal investigating genocide in Rwanda.

But it was Pillay’s work last year on a U.N. commission on Israel that made the Nobel committee’s announcement Friday an intensely political decision, as it put the prize in the middle of one of the world’s most divisive issues.

That commission said Israel was committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, a finding that Israel rejected.

Announcing the award, the Nobel committee did not explicitly mention Gaza, instead citing Pillay’s long career in human rights and a global shift toward “power politics” that had undermined respect for law and justice. The committee chair, Jorgen Watne Frydnes, called the award “a message to those who are attacking” international law.

Pillay, 85, is “one of the most respected international jurists of our time,” the committee said, calling her “instrumental in ensuring that war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide are prosecuted.”

The office of Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, quickly denounced the committee in a statement, calling its members misguided and saying it had “lost its moral compass.” It also condemned Pillay’s work, accusing her of being prejudiced against Jews.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry went further, calling the Nobel decision a “grotesque weaponization of an award to legitimize anti-Israel hatred and prejudice.”

After learning she had won the award, Pillay, speaking at a conference of human rights lawyers in Nuremberg, Germany, said she had tried to hew only to the law and facts in her career, not politics.

“Why would you need courage to speak the truth?” she said. “You interpret the law, you look at all the facts. So it’s an impartial, you know, impartial decision-making.”

Her work on Israel and Gaza, though, was “an important part of the reasoning why she received the prize,” Frydnes told reporters.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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