South Africa addressed the UN’s highest court on Thursday in a bid to end the mass killing of civilians in Gaza, accusing Israel of carrying out genocide against Palestinians.
This is a claim that Israel has strongly denied as baseless.
The development came amid the ongoing and massive Israeli bombardment across the Gaza Strip in response to Hamas-led terror attacks on October 7.
The Hamas massacre had left some 1,200 Israeli and foreign nationals in southern Israel dead, while some 250 were taken hostage.
The South African legal team told the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague that Israel had demonstrated a “pattern of genocidal conduct” since launching its full-scale war in Gaza.
“This killing is nothing short of destruction of Palestinian life. It is inflicted deliberately, no-one is spared, not even newborn babies,” the court heard.
Israel’s actions had subjected the 2.3 million people of Gaza to an unprecedented level of attacks from the air, land and sea.
This resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians and the destruction of homes and essential public infrastructure, the South African lawyer, Ms Adila Hassim, alleged.
She said Israel had also prevented sufficient humanitarian aid from reaching those in need and created the risk of death by starvation and disease.
“Palestinians in Gaza are subject to relentless bombing wherever they go,” Hassim told the court.
She added that so many people had been killed that they were often buried unidentified in mass graves.
“An additional 60,000 Palestinians have been wounded and maimed.
“They are killed in their homes, in places where they seek shelter, hospitals, schools, mosques, churches, and as they tried to find food and water for their families.
“They have been killed if they have failed to evacuate the places to which they have fled and even if they attempted to flee along Israeli-declared safe routes,” she added.
As part of its claim against Israel, South Africa alleges that 6,000 bombs hit Gaza in the first week of the Israeli response to the Hamas-led attacks.
This included the use of 2,000-pound bombs at least 200 times “in southern areas of the Strip that were designated as safe”, and in the north, where refugee camps were located, Hassim said.
These weapons were “some of the biggest and most destructive bombs available,” she said..
It was because of these actions that Israel had contravened the Genocide Convention, the ICJ judges later heard, in reference to the global treaty inked by members of the United Nations after the Second World War to prevent crimes against humanity.
The hearing continues on Friday with the Israeli presentation.
In a related development, the UN’s top human rights official has defended criticism of the invasion of Gaza, saying that it is “not antisemitic” to call out “gross violations” of international humanitarian law.
Writing in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz on Wednesday, Volker Türk once again strongly condemned “the shocking cruelty of the attack launched from Gaza by Hamas and other armed groups on October 7”.
The massacres that ensued created “intense and continuing trauma” across Israel”, the UN rights chief continued, before insisting that the country’s “campaign of overwhelming force” had been “tainted by grave breaches of international law”.
Rocket fire from Gaza into Israel has also continued, Türk noted, before expressing regret that some Israeli officials had tried to discredit his Office’s concerns by claiming that they constitute “blood libel”.
“It is not a blood libel to deplore the failure to hold to account Israeli soldiers and armed settlers who have killed hundreds of Palestinians in the West Bank since October 7.
”Or the prolongation of a war whose conduct has raised grave international humanitarian and human rights law concerns,” the UN rights chief stressed.
