Israel testified at the International Court of Justice asking the ICJ to throw out a request from South Africa to halt its offensive into Rafah.
South Africa has accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. That charge won’t be decided for years. But the emergency meeting that South Africa called relates to a genocide that Israel is committing in Rafah.
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In January, the ICJ found it is “plausible” that Israel has committed acts that violate the Genocide Convention. The court said Israel must ensure that its forces refrain from committing any acts that the Genocide Convention has defined as “illegal.”
Israeli Justice Ministry official Gilad Noam called South Africa’s case, which accuses Israel of violating the Genocide Convention, “completely divorced from facts and circumstances.”
“(The case) makes a mockery of the heinous charge of genocide,” Noam said. He called it “an obscene exploitation of the most sacred convention.”
“There is a tragic war going on, but there is no genocide” in Gaza, Noam said.
The South African case is laughable conspiracy stuff.
The South African legal team, which set out its case for fresh emergency measures the previous day, framed the Israeli military operation as part of a genocidal plan aimed at bringing about the destruction of the Palestinian people.
South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Vusimuzi Madonsela, requested the court to order Israel to “immediately, totally and unconditionally, withdraw the Israeli army from the entirety of the Gaza Strip”.
South Africa brought its latest request for emergency action in response to an Israeli military assault on Rafah at the southern edge of Gaza, refuge for half the territory’s 2.3 million people who fled Israel’s offensive further north.
Israel’s Noam said that Israel’s military operations were not aimed at civilians, but at Hamas terrorists using Rafah as a stronghold, who have tunnel systems which could be used to smuggle hostages and militants out of Gaza.
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I’ve said this before: if Israel is committing genocide in Gaza or even just trying to commit genocide in Gaza they are doing a spectacularly inept job of it. If you believe the Gaza Health Ministry numbers of 36,000 dead Gaza civilians — and I tend not to believe terrorist propaganda — Israel has a lot of work to do to kill even half the 2.4 million Gazan civilians,
South Africa is allied with Hamas, as Noam pointed out in his testimony before the ICJ.
He noted that South Africa hosted a Hamas delegation in Johannesburg only six days before it submitted its latest request to the court for provisional measures.
“They did not use the meeting to urge Hamas to release the hostages, to stop targeting Israeli civilians, to cease using human shields, to cease operating from within and nearby hospitals, UN facilities, and other protected sites,” he said.
They apparently met, he charged, to discuss their continued campaign against Israel in the court and on the ground.
Noam raised the perfectly valid point that the examples of genocide violations by Israel cited by South Africa were “not evidence [of] a policy of illegal behaviour, let alone a policy of genocide”, he said.
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The court will decide whether it will order Israel to halt its Rafah attack and withdraw from Gaza perhaps as early as next week.