As the Gaza war escalated into the Red Sea, Israel yesterday focused its efforts on another battle, the judicial one. His lawyers responded for three hours to the accusations presented on Thursday before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the highest court of the UN, by South Africa, a country that considers that the military operation in Gaza maintains a “pattern of genocidal conduct” directed by the State and intended to eliminate the Palestinian population. “If there were acts of genocide, they were perpetrated against Israel” by Hamas, on October 7, said Tal Becker, the legal adviser to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in the second and final preliminary hearing of the case
The answer was severe. Israel accused South Africa of presenting to the Hague Tribunal, in the Netherlands, a “deeply distorted factual and legal picture” of the reality of the war in Gaza, as it was forgetting a part of history. He argued that the charge ignored Hamas’ attempt to commit “real genocide” in the October attack, when they killed 1,200 Israelis and captured about 240 (today it holds at least 129). A statement that the Australian lawyer accompanied with photographs of the hostages taken by Hamas, as well as images of the Israeli attack, which he defined as “the largest mass killing 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 said.
Unlike previous occasions, when Israel has boycotted international courts or UN investigations, which it considers biased, in this case it sent some of its best advisers to defend its position. Predictably, Becker also asserted that Israel’s military actions in Gaza are acts of self-defense against Hamas and “other terrorist organizations.” “We don’t want to destroy any town, but to protect ours”, retorted the lawyer. And he accused Pretoria of acting as a mouthpiece for Hamas, with whom he said he has maintained ties even after October 7.
South Africa, which filed the lawsuit at the highest court in December, hopes the judges will impose precautionary measures for Israel to immediately stop the offensive in the strip. The Pretoria legal team argued yesterday that the Israeli air and ground operation on the enclave, which has killed nearly 24,000 Palestinians (a third of them women and children), has leveled much of the territory and has forcibly displaced 85% of its 2.3 million inhabitants, aims to cause “the destruction of the population” in Gaza.
The convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, approved by the United Nations in 1948, after the mass murder of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, defines genocide as “acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group”. The rule 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.
For Israel, however, South Africa was not able to prove genocide and therefore the ICJ lacks jurisdiction to act under the convention and order it to stop its military actions in the strip, he said. British lawyer Malcolm Shaw, who led the Israeli delegation. He also reprimanded Pretoria for downgrading the charge of genocide – which he called the “crime of crimes” – after it applied it to the Israeli offensive. Shaw, the second of six members of the legal team to speak, argued that the high death toll in Gaza does not amount to genocide: “Armed conflict is brutal and it costs lives”, but that does not mean that “ all conflicts are genocide”.
In addition, for lawyer Shaw, South Africa has only provided “a few” controversial statements by Israeli political leaders and which, in his opinion, are not a “plausible reason for genocidal intent”.
Another of the arguments put forward by the Israeli team was that Hamas uses civilians as human shields, uses hospitals and ambulances as cover-ups and withholds humanitarian aid. Instead, Israel, he said, has eased aid access to the Gaza Strip – a claim that contradicted a complaint by the UN humanitarian office yesterday that Israeli authorities were systematically denying them delivery of aid to the north of the enclave. Because of all this, the Israeli lawyers asked the International Court of Justice to dismiss the case.
The Israeli delegation was accompanied by some relatives of Israeli citizens kidnapped or killed by Hamas, who repeated the previous day’s rally outside the Peace Palace, where the trial was being held, with photographs of the hostages. Dutch police stationed 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 struggle against white minority rule was applauded by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) of Yassir Arafat A statue of Nelson Mandela stands in the center of Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank. “My grandfather always regarded the Palestinian struggle as the greatest moral issue of our time,” Mandla Mandela, grandson of the late South African president Nelson Mandela, told Reuters at a rally in support of the Palestinians in Cape Town yesterday. .
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
Meanwhile, in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army continued its intense offensive in the center and south of the enclave, especially on Khan Iunis.
The court is expected to rule on the injunction later this month, but will not rule on the genocide charges at that time; these procedures could take years as they require extensive research. The crime of genocide, like war crimes or crimes against humanity, does not have a statute of limitations. The 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 it had “violated the obligation to prevent genocide” in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica in 1995 and agreed to try the case against Burma for its persecution of the Rohingya in 2016
