As the Gaza war escalates in the Red Sea, Israel must focus its efforts this Friday on another battle, the judicial one. Their lawyers respond for three hours this morning to the accusations presented yesterday by South Africa before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest UN court, that its military operation in Gaza maintains a “pattern of genocidal conduct” directed by a State and aimed at eliminating the Palestinian population. “If there were acts of genocide, they were perpetrated against Israel” on October 7, Tal Becker, the legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said at the second and final preliminary hearing. “Hamas seeks genocide against Israel,” he added.
The response was severe. Israel accused South Africa of presenting to the court a “deeply distorted factual and legal picture” of the reality of its war in Gaza. He also argued that the prosecution ignored Hamas’ attempt at genocide, where they killed 1,200 Israelis and captured about 240 (today they hold at least 129). A statement that the Australian lawyer accompanied with photographs of the hostages taken by Hamas, as well as images of the attack on Israel, defined as “the largest mass murder calculated in a single day since the Holocaust.” Hamas members “tortured children in front of their parents, parents in front of their children, burned people” and were guilty of rape and mutilation, he claimed.
“It’s the world upside down: the State of Israel is accused of genocide while it fights against genocide,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had already said yesterday after listening to South Africa’s arguments on the first day of hearings.
Unlike previous occasions, in which Israel has boycotted international courts or UN investigations, which it considers biased; In this case he has sent his best advisors to defend his position. As expected, Becker also argued that Israel’s military actions in Gaza are acts of self-defense against Hamas and “other terrorist organizations.” “We do not want to destroy any town, but rather protect our own,” the lawyer replied. And he reproached Pretoria for acting as a mouthpiece for Hamas, with whom he said he has maintained ties even after the Oct. 7 attack.
South Africa, which filed the lawsuit before the court in The Hague, in the Netherlands, in December, hopes that the judges will impose precautionary measures so that Israel immediately stops the offensive in the strip. The Pretoria team of lawyers argued yesterday that Israel’s air and ground operation on the enclave, which has killed more than 23,400 Palestinians (a third of them women and children), devastated much of the territory and forcibly displaced 85% of its 2.3 million inhabitants, aims to cause “the destruction of the population” in Gaza.
The Convention to Prevent Genocide, adopted by the United Nations in 1948 following the mass murder of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, defines genocide as “acts committed with the intention of destroying, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic or , racial or religious”. The standard is in force in 152 countries, including Israel. Any of the signatory countries, such as South Africa, can bring cases of genocide to the highest international justice level.
For Israel, however, South Africa was not able to prove genocide and, therefore, the ICJ does not have jurisdiction to act under the convention to order it to stop its military actions in the strip, said British lawyer Malcolm Shaw, who leads the delegation. Furthermore, he criticized Pretoria for watering down the charge of genocide – which he called the “crime of crimes” – by applying it to the Israeli offensive. Shaw, the second of six members of the Israeli legal team to speak, argued that the high death toll in Gaza does not amount to genocide: “Armed conflict is brutal and costs lives,” but this does not mean that “all conflicts are genocides”.
Another argument put forward by the Israeli team was that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, uses hospitals and ambulances as cover, and withholds humanitarian aid. Instead, Israel, it said, has facilitated humanitarian access to the Gaza Strip – a claim that contradicted the UN humanitarian office’s complaint today that Israeli authorities were systematically denying them aid delivery to the Gaza Strip. northern Gaza. For all these reasons, Israeli lawyers asked the court to dismiss the case.
The Israeli defense came on the same day that the United Nations humanitarian office insisted that Israeli authorities were systematically denying it access to northern Gaza to deliver aid.
The Israeli delegation was accompanied by some relatives of Israeli citizens kidnapped or murdered by Hamas, who repeated the previous day’s rally outside the Peace Palace, where the trial was being held, with photographs of the hostages. The Dutch police placed them at the back of the building while the pro-Palestinian protesters were at the entrance, after marching through The Hague.
Post-apartheid South Africa has long championed the Palestinian cause, a relationship forged when the African National Congress’s fight against white minority rule was applauded by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization. A statue of Nelson Mandela stands in the center of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. The South African Minister of Justice, Ronald Lamola, who was in The Hague as part of the plaintiff team, pointed out that this procedure “is not against the Jewish people, it is against the actions of the State of Israel” in Gaza.
The court is expected to rule on the injunctions later this month, but will not rule at that time on the genocide accusations; These procedures could take years, as they require extensive investigation. The crime of genocide, like war crimes or crimes of humanity, does not prescribe. Decisions of the ICJ, which rules on disputes between nations and has jurisdiction over Israel, are final and without appeal, but the court has no way to enforce them. It has never ruled a country responsible for genocide, although it ruled that Serbia had “violated the obligation to prevent genocide” in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in 1995 and agreed to try the case against Myanmar for its persecution of the Rohingya in 2016.
