Israel accuses SA of making a mockery of the Genocide Convention

Reading Time: 5 minutes

The State of Israel has asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to reject South Africa’s request for additional provisional measures against it over its conduct in the war in Gaza. Israel’s legal team pushed back at what it called South Africa’s egregious efforts to distort the facts of the war in Gaza before Justices of the Court.

South Africa yesterday urged the ICJ to stop Israel’s destruction of Gaza and order new provisional measures that order Israel to stop its military offensive in Rafah and Gaza more broadly and scale up humanitarian aid into the enclave.

But Israel’s Deputy Attorney General Gilad Noam accused South Africa of making a mockery of the Genocide Convention.

Israel also complained that it was unable to secure its preferred legal team for the public hearing given the short notice it received from the Court.

“The State of Israel requests the Court to reject the request for the modification and indication of provisional measures submitted by the republic of South Africa.”  This is how Israel’s rebuttal ended before the Court, the ICJ immediately cutting the feed for a few seconds before the hearing formally concluded. After Israel accused South Africa of outrageous distortions and of making what it called a mockery of the crime of genocide.

Israel’s Deputy Attorney General Gilad Noam, “South Africa presents the court yet again, for the fourth time within the scope of less than five months, with a picture that is completely divorced from the facts and circumstances. Israel is engaged in a difficult and tragic armed conflict. South Africa ignores this factual context, which is essential in order to comprehend the situation and also ignores the applicable legal framework of international humanitarian law. It makes a mockery of the heinous charge of genocide. As Israel has previously stated before, these courts, when dealing with the law, facts matter. Truth should matter. Words must retain their meaning.”

He laid out key points of rebuttal, that Israel was engaged in a war it did not want or start and was defending itself from a brutal attack against its citizens by Hamas, who for more than 224 days continues to hold more than 120 hostages captive.

He argued that bringing down Hamas’ stronghold in Rafah would free Palestinians from a murderous terrorist group.

He further criticized South Africa for only calling for additional measures against Israel and not Hamas that continues to fire rockets
at Israel, further accusing South Africa of being an ally of Hamas and seeking to gain for the group a military advantage through this ICJ process and that violations of the rules of war were common in armed conflict but that Israel had a robust legal system to investigate and ensure accountability.

Worth noting is that Hamas is not a state’s party and therefore not subject to the jurisdiction of the ICJ in relation to the Genocide Convention.

“South Africa purports to describe Rafah as the last refuge for civilians in Gaza. While many civilians have indeed evacuated to Rafah over the past few months, the fact remains that the city of Rafah also serves as a military stronghold for Hamas, which continues to pose a significant threat to the State of Israel and its citizens. In two of your folders, you can find a map showing locations of rocket sites, tunnels, shafts and command and control sites embedded in civil in the civilian population in Rafah. South Africa warns this quote that I quote ‘If Rafah falls, so too does Gaza.’ Once again, however, the reality is exactly the opposite. Only by bringing down Hamas’ military stronghold in Rafah will Palestinians be liberated from the clenched grip of the murderous terrorist regime and the road to peace and prosperity may finally be paved,” adds Noam.

Israel also rejected South Africa’s criticism that it had shut down main entry points for life saving aid into Gaza.

Part of Israel’s legal team, Tamar Kaplan Tourgeman elaborates, “South Africa claims that Israel has shut down the two main crossing through which aid enters into Gaza, this being the Rafah and Kerem Shalom crossings and that Israel has cut off from all humanitarian, medical and other supplies. This is patently untrue. The truth is that Israel allows and facilitates, as it has been for months, the provision of more and more humanitarian aid to the civilian population throughout the Gaza Strip. It does so through a number of crossings on a daily basis.”

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs on Thursday said that for days crossings into southern Gaza had been closed, unsafe to access or not logistically viable and that distribution was almost impossible without regular fuel imports.

At the conclusion of the hearing, German Justice Georg Nolte asked Israel’s counsel to provide information to the court about the existing humanitarian conditions in the designated evacuation zones to which it has urged civilians in Rafah to move to, in particular at Al-Mawasi; probing how Israel would ensure safe passage to these zones as well as the provision of shelter, food, water and other humanitarian aid and assistance to all evacuees expected to arrive there.

More than 630 000 people have now fled Rafah.