South Africa tells UN court Israel is committing genocide
◆ Lawyers ask judges at The Hague to order halt to military campaign in Gaza but Netanyahu says war is in ‘full compliance with international law’
Africa has told judges at the United Nations’ top court that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and pleaded with the court to urgently order a halt to the country’s military operation.
Israel has vehemently denied such arguments, even ahead of the opening arguments at the UN court in The Hague yesterday.
South African lawyers said the latest Gaza war is part of a decades-long oppression of the Palestinians by Israel.
Lawyers for South Africa asked judges at yesterday’s hearings to impose binding preliminary orders on Israel, including an immediate halt to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
“Genocides are never declared in advance, but this court has the benefit of the past 13weeksofevidencethatshows incontrovertibly a pattern of conduct and related intention that justifies as a plausible claim of genocidal acts,” South African lawyer Adila Hassim told the judges and audience at the Peace Palace in The Hague. “Nothingwillstopthesuffering exceptanorderfromthiscourt. Without an indication of provisional measures, the atrocities will continue, with the Israeli Defence Force indicating it intends pursuing this course of action for at least a year.”
Ahead of the proceedings, hundreds of pro-israeli protesters marched close to the courthouse with banners saying “bring them home”, referring to the hostages still held by Hamas. Outside the court, otherswereprotestingandwaving the Palestinian flag in support of South Africa’s move.
The dispute strikes at the heart of Israel’s national identity as a Jewish state created in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide in the Holocaust. It also involvessouthafrica’sidentity; its governing party, the African National Congress, has long compared Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank to its own history under the apartsouth heid regime of white-minority rule, which restricted most black people to “homelands” before ending in 1994.
Although it normally considers UN and international tribunals unfair and biased, Israel has sent a strong legal team to defend its military operation launched in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks by Hamas.
South Africa immediately sought to broaden the case beyond the narrow confines of the ongoing Israel-hamas war.
South African justice minister Ronald Lamola said: “The violence and the destruction in Palestine and Israel did not begin on October 7, 2023. The Palestinians have experienced systematic oppression and violence for the last 76 years.”
Vusimuzi Madonsela, the co-leader of South Africa’s delegation, said that “at the outset, South Africa acknowledged that the genocidal acts and omissions by the state of Israel inevitably form part of a continuum of illegal acts perpetrated against the people of Palestinian people since 1948”, when Israel declared its independence.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a video statement on Wednesday night defending his country’s actions and insisted they had nothing to do with genocide. “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population,” he said. “Israel is fighting Hamas terrorists, not the Palestinian population, and we are doing so in full compliance with international law.”
He said the Israeli military was “doing its utmost to minimise civilian casualties, while Hamas is doing its utmost to maximise them by using Palestinian civilians as human shields”.
In the opening session in The Hague, South Africa called for the court to issue an interim order for an immediate halt to Israel’s military actions. A decision will likely take weeks.
Israel’s offensive has killed more than 23,200 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the Health Ministry in Hamasrun Gaza. About two-thirds of the dead are women and children, health officials say. The death toll does not distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Mr Hassim said: “Mothers, fathers, children, siblings, grandparents, aunts, cousins are often all killed together.
Iran’s navy seizes oil tanker in gulf of Oman
This killing is nothing short of destruction of Palestinian life. It is inflicted deliberately. No one is spared, not even newborn babies.”
Israel itself has always focused attention on the October 7 attacks, when Hamas fighters stormed through several communities in Israel and killed some 1,200 people, mainly civilians. They abducted around 250 others, nearly half of whom have been released.
The world court, which rules on disputes between nations, has never judged a country to be responsible for genocide. The closest it came was in 2007 when it ruled that Serbia “violated the obligation to prevent genocide” in the July 1995 massacre by Bosnian Serb forces of more than 8,000 Muslim men andboysinthebosnianenclave of Srebrenica. The International Criminal Court, based a few miles away in The Hague, prosecutes individuals for war crimes,crimesagainsthumanity and genocide.
The case revolves around the genocide convention that was drawn up in 1948 in the aftermath of the Second World War and the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust. Both Israel and South Africa are signatories. Israel is back on the International Court of Justice’s docketnextmonth,whenhearings open into a UN request for a non-binding advisory opinion on the legality of Israeli policies in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
Iran's navy yesterday seized an oil tanker in the Gulf of Oman that was once at the centre of a major crisis between Tehran and Washington, officials have said.
The vessel was once known as the Suez Rajan and had been involved in a year-long dispute that ultimately saw the US justice department seize one million barrels of Iranian crude oil on it.
The seizure also comes after weeks of attacks by Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthi rebels on shipping in the Red Sea, including their largest barrage ever of drones and missiles launched late on Tuesday, which were interecepted by Us-led forces, including HMS Diamond, inset.
That has raised the risk of possible retaliatory strikes by the Us-led forces now patrolling the vital waterway, especially after a United Nations Security Council vote on Wednesday condemning the Houthis, and as American and British officials warned of potential consequences over the attacks.
Iran's state-run IRNA news agency acknowledged the seizure in a brief report late yesterday afternoon, hours after armed men boarded it.
"The violating oil tanker Suez Rajan ... stole Iranian oil by leading it to the Americans and delivered it to the Americans," state TV said.
It said Iran's navy, rather than its paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, conducted the seizure. Past tense incidents at sea have largely involved the Guard.
The United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, which provides warnings to sailors in the Middle East, said yesterday’s seizure began early in the morning, in the waters between Oman and Iran in an area transited by ships coming in and out of the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow mouth of the Persian Gulf through which a fifth of all traded oil passes.
The military-run group said that further efforts to contact the ship had failed and that the men who had boarded the vessel were wearing "black military-style uniforms with black masks".
The private security firm Ambrey said that "four to five armed persons" boarded the ship, which it identified as the oil tanker St Nikolas. It said that the men had covered CCTV cameras as they boarded.
The tanker had been off the city of Basra, Iraq, loading crude oil bound for Aliaga, Turkey, for the Turkish refinery firm Tupras.
Satellite-tracking data showed the Marshall Islandsflagged tanker had turned and headed towards the port of Bandar-e Jask in Iran.