Top official slams ‘no moral rule when it comes to Israel’

DESPITE all the talk of rights and rules, the concepts seem invalid when it comes to Israel, Deputy Foreign Minister Ahmet Yıldız said Monday as he slammed Tel Aviv for “violating every moral rule of the rule of law” in Palestine.

“The real solution to the issue is that Israel must return to international legitimacy,” Yıldız told Anadolu Agency (AA) after delivering an oral statement to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague in a case examining the legal consequences of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories from 1967 to present day, which follows a request by the U.N. General Assembly in 2022 to issue a nonbinding opinion on the issue.

Addressing the World Court on the final day of weeklong hearings from 52 countries and international organizations, Yıldız, on behalf of Türkiye, called on the ICJ to declare policies and practices of Israel on occupied Palestine, including East Jerusalem and the West Bank, “illegal” under international law.

Yıldız also mentioned the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas in Israel, which killed 1,200 people, and Israel’s military response that has since killed over 29,800 Palestinians. Israeli bombardment has also injured over 70,000, devastated 60% of the enclave’s infrastructure and caused a worsening humanitarian crisis. It has pushed 85% of the territory’s population into internal displacement amid acute shortages of food, clean water and medicine.

Noting that other nations at the court too argued the unlawfulness of Israeli occupation, Yıldız said: “All speakers are actually agreed on this but the logjams at the (U.N.) Security Council unfortunately prevent these from being realized.”

Yıldız also stressed the significance of protecting the status of Jerusalem and its holy sites, saying: “East Jerusalem will of course be the capital of a Palestinian state. Any other solution would not be accepted in the Muslim world.”

Turkish Parliamentary Justice Commission Chair Cüneyt Yüksel, who accompanied Yıldız during the hearing, also condemned Israel for being “the hotbed of cruelty and instability for both Palestine and the Muslim world.”

“Israel is nurtured as a spoiled representative and a shameless distant bastion of colonialist ideology in the Middle East, and in this way, with all kinds of support, it committed irreparable atrocities, grave human rights violations and terrible massacres throughout the region,” he said.

Emphasizing that international law should be applied equally to everyone under all circumstances, without allowing any exceptions or exceptionalism, Yüksel said, “We hope that the court will act with this principle, and we express once again that we, as Türkiye, will provide all the support we can to the ICJ process.”