The war in Gaza moves for a few hours to The Hague, Netherlands. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court of the UN, will host this Thursday the first hearings on South Africa’s accusation against Israel for having “a genocidal intention” in its actions in the strip, said Tembeka Ngcukaitobi, lawyer at the High Court. of South Africa, during the presentation of the prosecution case this morning. Israel denies it. But South Africa asks the Court to order the immediate suspension of the Israeli military offensive as a preliminary measure. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Palestinian National Authority did the same. “Retaliation against Hamas cannot justify genocide,” stated the South African Minister of Justice, Roland Lamola, at the beginning of the hearing.
The two days of preliminary hearings began with South Africa’s lawyers (Israel’s turn is Friday) explaining for three hours why the country accuses Israel of “acts and omissions” of a “genocidal nature” in the Gaza war. The South African legal team mentioned several times that Israel has “transgressed” the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, adopted at the United Nations in 1948 and in force in 152 countries, including Israel. Specifically, its article two: “Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
In its accusation, South Africa singled out Israel for maintaining a “pattern of genocidal conduct” in the strip, with “mass murders,” “forced displacement” and “serious physical or mental harm.” Palestinians are at “immediate risk of dying from hunger, dehydration and disease due to the siege, the destruction of Palestinian cities, the insufficient access of aid allowed to the Palestinian population and the inability to distribute that limited aid while the bombs fall,” he warned. the South African lawyer Adila Hassim. And she added that Israel “has killed an incomparable and unprecedented number of civilians with full knowledge of how many civilian lives each bomb will claim.”
Minutes later, lawyer Ngcukaitobi showed videos of Israeli soldiers celebrating the destruction of the Palestinian enclave with dances and songs. “Israel has a genocidal intent against the Palestinians in Gaza… that is evident from the way this military attack is being carried out,” he said. “It is rooted in the belief that the enemy is not just Hamas, but is embedded in the fabric of Palestinian life in Gaza,” he added.
The forcefulness of the accusation increased with each new lawyer. When it was the turn of John Dugard, a South African professor of international law and former UN rapporteur on human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, he accused Israel of turning the Gaza Strip into “a concentration camp where genocide”, before a court made up of 17 judges (15 chosen by the UN plus one from each country).
These specific hearings will not yet go into the merits of the case, that will be later, and will only focus on the need for precautionary measures to “protect the rights of the Palestinian people against greater, serious and irreparable harm” during the offensive in Gaza . That is why South Africa’s lawyers also argued why they are asking the court to issue an interim order for an immediate cessation of Israel’s military actions. In this sense, Hassim demanded that the ICJ impose urgent precautionary measures on Tel Aviv to protect the Palestinians in Gaza.
The decision is likely to take weeks to make or, at the earliest, by the end of the month. And the case may take years to resolve.
Some pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian protesters have gathered in front of the Peace Palace in The Hague, which houses the headquarters of international law. The tension is palpable in the street, where the police are trying to maintain a safe distance between both concentrations. Thousands of kilometers to the east, in Gaza, Hamas was also closely following what was happening in the Netherlands, while the Palestinians in the south of the strip, especially punished today by the bombings, also watched the case with hope, feeling that South Africa It gave voice to three months of complaints, according to an Al Jazeera correspondent from Rafah.
In Israel, meanwhile, it already fully affects its political debate, despite the fact that it is unanimous to deny that acts of genocide are committed in Gaza. This is an accusation that is compared day after day to the Nazi genocide in the Holocaust. South Africa’s accusation, for its part, cannot be separated from its own history of apartheid, when the white minority restricted the rights of the black population until 1994.
Israel has sent a former judge from its Supreme Court to defend its position, which indicates its interest in refuting the arguments about genocide in Gaza, rejects that attacks against the Palestinians as a people with the aim of exterminating them and insists that Hamas uses civilians as shields, and hence the heavy number of casualties in Gaza. “It is very difficult to discern between civilians and terrorists,” it is often defended.
The Secretary of State of the United States, Antony Blinken, dismissed the case during his visit this week to Israel, calling the accusation “baseless”: “It is particularly outrageous, given that those who are attacking Israel [in reference to Hamas, Hizbullah, the Houthis and Iran] continue to call for the annihilation of Israel and the mass murder of Jews,” he said. Colombia and Brazil, for their part, have expressed their support for South Africa.
Although South Africa was the first country to initiate the procedure against Israel on December 29, it was not the first to warn about the crimes being committed in Gaza that point to a “genocide in the making,” according to a long list of experts. in Human Rights of the UN, in November. Before, nearly 800 academics, civil society organizations, including Palestinians who experience Israeli violence daily, and the former Minister of Social Rights of Spain Ione Belarra, also did the same.
Israel’s offensive has killed more than 23,300 Palestinians in Gaza, according to data from the Gaza Ministry of Health, around two-thirds of the dead being women and children. In the October 7 attacks, Hamas killed more than a thousand Israelis and is holding at least 129 hostage.
The International Court of Justice, which rules on disputes between nations and has jurisdiction over Israel, has never held a country responsible for genocide and the closest it came was in 2007, when it ruled that Serbia “breached the obligation to prevent genocide.” genocide” in the July 1995 massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces.