Doubt cast on Israel’s evidence to ICJ
UK-based research group says Israeli legal team misrepresented its evidence to the court — eight times
On the same day Israel delivered its report-back to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on measures it was taking to implement the court’s injunction not to commit genocide in Gaza, a UK-based research group said Israel’s legal team had earlier misrepresented its evidence to the ICJ — eight times.
The report from Forensic Architecture, based at Goldsmiths, the University of London, casts doubt on the credibility of the evidence Israel put before the court. It is likely to be relied on by South Africa when it sends its comments on Israel’s confidential report-back into court.
In answer to questions from the Sunday Times, Israel said it “reject[ed] outright the faulty claims” made in the report, saying they ranged “from being petty to manipulative and erroneous”.
Lior Haiat, spokesperson for Israel’s foreign affairs minister, said the report suffered from a number of “faulty patterns”, including making conclusions on the basis that the evidence Israel brought to court “for Hamas’s strategies” was the only evidence it had, while these were “examples taken out of countless other evidence ... as well as additional intelligence that can’t be shared publicly”. Haiat added that Forensic Architecture had a “100% record of being anti-Israeli in its ‘researches’”.
The facts on the ground in Gaza have been intensely contested in the public arena since the horrific October 7 attack by Hamas, with claims that Israel is misleading the public and even doctoring evidence. Israel vociferously denies this.
But if the ICJ were to agree that Israel’s legal team had misrepresented evidence, it could affect how the court will treat Israel’s report-back.
The ICJ heard argument in South Africa’s case against Israel in January. Two weeks later, the court found there was a “plausible” case that Palestinians’ rights under the Genocide Convention were being breached. It gave a number of interim orders or “provisional measures ”— including that Israel “take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of this Convention”.
It also ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to prevent and punish direct and public incitement to commit genocide, and to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance.
Israeli media reported on Monday that Israel’s report-back to the court said it was complying with the court’s orders. Human rights NGOs Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch disputed this. “Israel has failed to take even the bare minimum steps to comply,” Amnesty International said on Monday.
The implications of the report by the multidisciplinary research group Forensic Architecture go further. Its report said Israel had misrepresented the visual evidence shown at the ICJ hearing in January.
“We found eight instances,” said the report. The misrepresentations were done “through a combination of incorrect annotations and labelling, and misleading verbal descriptions,” it said.
One of these was the claim that Hamas fired missiles from within Al-Quds hospital. During Israel’s oral argument on January 12, Galit Raguan, the director of Israel’s international justice division in the office of the deputy attorney-general, said: “South Africa also alleges that Israel has waged an assault on Gaza’s health system. What South Africa has neglected to bring before the court, however, is the overwhelming evidence of
Hamas’s military use of such hospitals ... In the slide before you, you will see a militant going into Quds Hospital with an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]. Hamas fired at IDF [Israel Defense Forces] forces from near, and from within, Quds Hospital”.
But Forensic Architecture said the slide had mislabelled a building as part of the hospital. It was close to, but not part of the hospital. Instead, the building the militant was going into appeared to be “a mixed-use commercial or residential building. The ground floor of the building has a commercial sign for a shop selling sweets or desserts ...” Aerial images of the hospital reinforce this, because the three hospital buildings have signs of the red crescent, said the report.
Forensic Architecture said the photo came from a video, released by the Israeli military on November 13 2023.
“In the [full] video, we do not see the Palestinian fighter, pointed to by the Israeli legal team during the ICJ hearing ... entering the hospital at any point,” said the report.
But Haiat said the IDF had always said “that forces were fired upon from the entrance to the hospital”.
He said it was “preposterous” to argue that the white line used in the image presented at court delineating the hospital boundary, and the placement of the word “hospital”, amounted to misleading the court.
“The presence of a terrorist holding an RPG at the hospital entrance as shown in the picture presented in court is irrefutable,” he said.
The research group also disputed some of the legal team’s claims about the Al-Shifa hospital. Raguan said: “Here, you can see an opening to the tunnel that ran for hundreds of metres directly under the hospital.”
But the report said that Israel’s own military had said that the tunnel ran for 55m. It had said so in the same press release from which the photo presented by Raguan was derived, said the report. But Haiat said subsequent operations had revealed “more terror infrastructure”.
He referred to a New York Times article of 12 February that said classified Israeli intelligence indicated the tunnel was “at least 700 feet long [about 110m].”
The report also found that a picture, presented by Raguan as “evidence of a rocket launched from next to Gaza’s water desalination facility” , was “incorrectly labelled and annotated”. It was likely not to have been a Palestinian rocket launch site and more likely a “crater — a trace of Israeli-inflicted destruction”, said the report.
“We used satellite images and 3D modelling to calculate the size and depth of the highlighted feature. The crater measures approximately 7m in diameter and, according to our shadow analysis, 2m in depth.
“The dimensions of the crater are consistent with the impacts of a bomb between 500lb and 1,000lb. We compared its dimensions and shape to those of other craters visible throughout Gaza and found them to be consistent with one another,” said the report.
Raguan had presented this picture in order to discredit South Africa’s argument that Israel has used military force even in humanitarian zones: “What the applicant neglected to inform the court, however, was that Hamas has — in its contempt for Palestinian civil life — regularly and deliberately fired from such zones, turning areas of relief into zones of conflict . ... in the next slide you can see evidence of a rocket launched from next to Gaza’s water desalination facility.”
Haiat said a video of the launch site was previously published by the UK’s Sun newspaper, showing the rocket launcher site “minutes after being struck by IDF”. He said the video showed “the remaining flames and heated fragments, which is consistent with such strikes on launchers”.
The Sun reported that the video was supplied to it by the IDF.
In the [full] video, we do not see the Palestinian fighter, pointed to by the Israeli legal team ... entering the hospital at any point