South Africa appeals to the International Court of Justice: Stop Israel’s genocide in Gaza

South Africa’s 84 page long Application to the International Court of Justice to begin proceedings against Israel for its genocide in Gaza is a devastating document laying out Israel’s genocidal acts and statements in horrifying detail.

BY ROBERT HERBST  DECEMBER 31, 2023  mondoweiss.net

ISRAELI SOLDIERS STATIONED JUST OUTSIDE GAZA OVERLOOKING THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SHUJAIYA NEIGHBORHOOD IN GAZA CITY, DECEMBER 29 2023. (PHOTO: © ATEF SAFADI/EFE VIA ZUMA PRESS APAIMAGES)

On Thursday, December 28, South Africa filed an Application Instituting Proceedings at the International Court of Justice to commence proceedings in a legal forum against Israel for its genocide in Gaza, and to press for “provisional measures” – a preliminary order requiring the Israel Government and military to cease their genocidal acts in Gaza pending a full hearing by the court.

South Africa’s Application is 84 pages long and devastating – to the State of Israel, to its Jewish political and military leaders and personnel committing the genocidal acts and speaking openly of their genocidal intent, to those in Israel, America, and Europe standing so firmly in support of them, and to the Jewish people in whose name Israel purports to act.

The Application lays out these genocidal acts and statements in horrifying detail, after noting the contextual background so often missing in diplomatic and mainstream media discussion of the Gaza war. Israel’s acts of genocide, says South Africa: 

“are distinct from other violations of international law sanctioned or perpetrated by the Israeli government and military in Gaza — including intentionally directing attacks against the civilian population, civilian objects and buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science, historic monuments, hospitals, and places where the sick and wounded are collected; torture; the starvation of civilians as a method of warfare; and other war crimes and crimes against humanity” – all of which have occurred “in the broader context of Israel’s [] 75-year-long apartheid, its 56-year-long belligerent occupation of Palestinian territory and its 16-year-long blockade of Gaza[.]”  

Indeed, one of the most salient parts of the Application is its meticulous documentation of the misery that Israel imposed on Gazans before October 7, imposing a stringent blockade and effectively sealing them off from the outside world, reducing the area available for farming, severely reducing their ability to fish in the 20-mile zone stipulated in the Oslo Accords, and severely restricting food imports by calories per head to a humanitarian minimum after its “disengagement” and Hamas’s election victory in 2006, restricting electrical power, and polluting the coastal aquifer, the sole source of natural drinking water, all severely impairing daily living and the economy, resulting in a 45 percent unemployment rate and a 60 percent poverty rate, with 80 percent of the population dependent on some form of international assistance. And in the three years before October 7, Israel killed approximately 7,500 Gazans, including approximately 1,700 children. Over 18 months of weekly, peaceful protests at the separation fence against the blockade, Israeli snipers killed hundreds and wounded over 36,000, including nearly 9,000 children. Almost 5,000 unarmed people were shot in the lower limbs, deliberately, many standing hundreds of meters away.

All that would be bad enough. But, as the Application demonstrates, Israel has descended to a whole new level of criminality that clearly meets the definition of genocide under the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide: “acts intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group.”  

Gaza’s 2.3 million people clearly form a substantial part of that group, which numbers 5.5 million under occupation. The Application thoroughly documents these genocidal acts that violate the Convention: “killing Gazans en masse, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction.”

As the Application explains:

“Israel has now killed in excess of 21,110 named Palestinians, including over 7,729 children — with over 7,780 others missing, presumed dead under the rubble — and has injured over 55,243 other Palestinians, causing them severe bodily and mental harm. Israel has also laid waste to vast areas of Gaza, including entire neighbourhoods, and has damaged or destroyed in excess of 355,000 Palestinian homes [more than 60% of Gaza’s housing stock], alongside extensive tracts of agricultural land, bakeries, schools, universities, businesses, places of worship, cemeteries, cultural and archaeological sites, municipal and court buildings, and critical infrastructure, including water and sanitation facilities and electricity networks, while pursuing a relentless assault on the Palestinian medical and healthcare system. Israel has reduced and is continuing to reduce Gaza to rubble, killing, harming and destroying its people, and creating conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction as a group.”  

Israel now has to decide how to respond, both to the merits of South Africa’s claims and to the request for preliminary relief. Israel has an obligation as a UN member and a party to the Genocide Convention to respond, and it faces a judgment rather than merely an advisory opinion if it loses. This well-crafted, well-documented accusation of genocide is therefore an important and immediate legal and moral challenge to the Jewish State less than a century after the Holocaust.

Israel has already issued its first broadside condemning South Africa for launching its case against it, calling upon the ICJ “to completely reject South Africa’s baseless claims.”  The Israeli Foreign Ministry’s statement called it a “blood libel” by a nation cooperating with a terrorist organization, and claimed that its army directs its military efforts only against Hamas.

Genocidal intent

No one who reads South Africa’s Application for themselves could possibly credit Israel’s claim above because the statements of senior Israeli officials demonstrating genocidal intent are displayed in all their infamy – from the Prime Minister, President and Minister of Defense on down — proving that Israel is deliberately fighting a war against the entire Palestinian population of Gaza. Here are some of the most disgusting morsels: 

Prime Minister Netanyahu: invoking the Biblical story of the total destruction of the Amalek by the Israelites, which Biblical passage reads in relevant part: “Spare no one, but kill alike men and women, infants and sucklings, oxen and sheep, camels and asses.”

Continues…