This Monday, Nicaragua asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to demand that Germany “cease providing” political, financial and military support to Israel “in the face of its campaign of destruction” of the Palestinian people, since it violates the Genocide Convention, and urged Berlin to differentiate its commitment to the “Jewish people” from the “Israeli Government.”
In an intervention before the judges of the ICJ, the Nicaraguan ambassador in The Hague, Carlos José Arguello Gómez, also denounced that Berlin facilitates the commission of a genocide in Gaza with the withdrawal of its financing to the United Nations Refugee Agency in Palestine (UNRWA).
“What is striking about this reaction from Germany is that Israel, so to speak, suspended assistance to UNRWA, but ignored statements and accusations by leading international authorities that Israel was perpetrating genocide and other violations of international humanitarian law in Palestine,” he lamented.
UNRWA seeks to provide support, protection and meet the most basic needs of some 5.6 million Palestinian refugees registered in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. In January, Israel accused Hamas fighters of using UNRWA offices in northern Gaza for their operations and displayed weapons allegedly found inside.
This led several countries, including major donors such as the US, UK and Germany, to withdraw funding from the UN agency. “The Palestinian people are being subjected to one of the most destructive military actions in modern history,” denounced Arguello Gómez.
Furthermore, he stressed that Germany says that its assistance to Israel is due to the historical treatment of the Jewish people during the Nazi regime, but, the Nicaraguan ambassador warned, “that is an understandable and laudable policy if it were addressed to the Jewish people, but the State of “Israel, and particularly its current Government, should not be confused and equated with the Jewish people.”
“True friends of the Jewish people should emphasize the difference: the Jewish victims in the concentration camps in World War II would sympathize and empathize with the more than 30,000 civilians, including 25,000 mothers and children, massacred so far in Palestine, and the 20,000 orphaned children, with two mothers murdered every hour,” he denounced.
The ICJ is holding hearings this Monday and Tuesday on the need to issue precautionary measures against Germany in a procedure initiated in March by Nicaragua, which accused Berlin of not trying to “prevent a plausible genocide” against the Palestinians of Gaza, by providing “support political, financial and military” to Israel and by withdrawing funding from UNRWA.
This procedure is separate from that initiated by South Africa at the end of December to accuse Israel of violating the Genocide Convention (1948) with its operations in the Strip. The ICJ issued precautionary measures in January to require Israel to take “immediate and effective” steps to prevent the commission of genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza.
