The war in Gaza moved yesterday for a few hours to The Hague. The International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s highest court, hosted the first hearings on South Africa’s accusation against Israel for turning the strip into a “concentration camp where it carries out genocide” , as one of his lawyers, John Dugard, a South African professor of international law and former UN rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, assured in the accusation. Israel denies it.
South Africa insisted on it during the three hours that the presentation of arguments lasted, with which it also tried to convince the court to order the immediate suspension of the Israeli military offensive as a first measure.
The two days of preliminary hearings started yesterday with South Africa’s legal team (Israel’s turn is today) and it was said several times that Israel has violated the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crime of Genocide, approved at the United Nations in 1948 and in force in 152 countries, including Israel. “Genocide means any act committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group,” says the document, which was promoted after the Holocaust.
No one escapes the paradox that the historical fact that was at the origin of the definition of genocide had as its victim the people who today face the accusation of executioner. The accusation of South Africa also cannot be separated from another exceptional event in its history, apartheid, a period in which the white minority restricted the rights of the black population until 1994.
In the accusation, South Africa singled out Israel for having maintained a “pattern of genocidal conduct” in the strip, with “mass killings”, “forced displacements” and “serious physical or mental harm”. Palestinians are at “immediate risk of dying of hunger, dehydration and disease from the siege, the destruction of cities, the insufficient access of aid to the population and the impossibility of distributing this limited aid while the bombs are falling”, warned the South African lawyer Adila Hassim before a court made up of 17 judges (15 chosen by the UN, plus one from each of the contending countries). Meanwhile, outside the Peace Palace, hundreds of pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered to make their voices heard.
In Gaza, Hamas was also closely following what was happening in the Netherlands, while the Palestinians in the south of the strip, particularly punished by the bombings yesterday, were also watching the case with hope and felt that South Africa was giving voice to three months of denunciations , explained the correspondent of Al-Jazeera from Rafah.
Lawyer Ngcukaitobi showed as evidence of Israel’s “genocidal intent” several videos of Israeli soldiers celebrating the destruction of the Palestinian enclave with dances and songs, as well as the words of Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant , who described the Palestinians as “human animals”.
These hearings will not yet go into the merits of the case. They will only focus on the need for the ICJ to impose urgent precautionary measures on Tel-Aviv with the aim of “protecting the rights of the Palestinian people against greater, grave and irreparable harm” during the Gaza offensive. It will probably take weeks to make a decision: at the very least, by the end of January. But it is also likely to take years to resolve, given that it is very difficult to prove genocide.
The ICJ, which rules on disputes between nations and has jurisdiction over Israel, has never judged a country responsible for genocide, and the closest it came was in 2007, when it ruled that Serbia “violated the obligation to prevent genocide” in the July 1995 massacre of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces.
Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip has killed more than 23,300 Palestinians, according to data from the Gaza Ministry of Health, nearly two-thirds of the dead were women and children, and 10,000 more may be buried under the rubble. In the attacks of October 7, Hamas murdered more than a thousand Israelis and held at least 129 hostages. In Gaza “there is very strong evidence of war crimes, crimes against humanity and the risk of real genocide”, he assures La Vanguard the director of Amnesty International Spain (AI), Esteban Beltrán.
All three are crimes that do not prescribe and have the same level of seriousness in terms of international criminal law, explains Beltrán. His organization has provided evidence to bolster South Africa’s accusation at the ICJ. But there are differences: a war crime is a concrete fact; for example, a bombing of a family in Gaza or the summary execution of Israeli civilians by Hamas in southern Israel. Crimes against humanity, on the other hand, are planned and systematic acts to harm or commit serious violations of human rights: it would be the forced displacement to the south of the strip of 85% of the population. Meanwhile, genocide is the “attempt to physically destroy an entire group of people”, as described by Beltrán.
It is not known what the ICJ’s verdict will be, and the court has yet to hear Israel’s defense today. Tel Aviv has sent a former judge from its Supreme Court to defend its position, indicating its interest in rebutting arguments about the genocide in Gaza. Israel considered yesterday that South Africa’s allegations were “a great display of hypocrisy”, said Lior Haiat, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. And he accused the African country of “functioning as the legal arm of the terrorist group Hamas” and “completely distorting the reality in Gaza after the massacre of October 7”, which for Israel was indeed an “attempt to carry out a genocide”. He also insisted that Hamas uses civilians as human shields.
If the court ruling ends up ordering the end of the war in Gaza, a decision that is binding, it will be necessary to see how Israel responds, which has not complied with a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire.
