Israel rejects charges of genocide at court
Germany throws its support behind the assertion that attacks in Gaza are legitimate self-defense.
THE HAGUE — Accused of committing genocide against Palestinians, Israel insisted at the United Nations’ highest court Friday that its war in Gaza was a legitimate defense of its people and that it was Hamas militants who were guilty of genocide.
Israel described the allegations leveled by South Africa as hypocritical and said that one of the biggest cases ever to come before an international court reflected a world turned upside down. Israeli leaders defend their air and ground offensive in Gaza as a legitimate response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, when militants stormed through Israeli communities, killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took about 250 hostage.
Israeli legal advisor Tal Becker told a packed auditorium at the ornate Palace of Peace in The Hague that the country is fighting a “war it did not start and did not want.”
“In these circumstances, there can hardly be a charge more false and more malevolent than the allegation against Israel of genocide,” he added, noting that the horrible suffering of civilians in war was not enough to bring a charge of genocide.
On Friday afternoon, Germany said it wants to intervene in the proceedings on Israel’s behalf, saying there was “no basis whatsoever” for an accusation of genocide against Israel.
“Hamas terrorists brutally attacked, tortured, killed and kidnapped innocent people in Israel,” German government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit said in a statement. “Since then, Israel has been defending itself against the inhumane attack by Hamas.”
He acknowledged that various countries view Israel’s actions in Gaza differently but that Germany expressly rejects the accusations of genocide.
Under the court’s rules, if Germany files a declaration of intervention in the case, it will be able to make legal arguments on behalf of Israel.
Germany would be allowed to intervene at the merits phase of the case to address how the genocide convention, drawn up in 1948 after World War II, should be interpreted, according to international lawyer Balkees Jarrah, associate director of the international justice program at Human Rights Watch.
“That would come after the court issues its decision on South Africa’s request for urgent measures to protect the Palestinian people in Gaza,” Jarrah told the Associated Press from The Hague, where she attended the ICJ hearings.
Germany’s support for Israel carries some symbolic significance given its Nazi history.
Hebestreit said Germany “sees itself as particularly committed to the Convention against Genocide.” He added: “We firmly oppose political instrumentalization.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu welcomed the announcement, saying the gesture “touches all of Israel’s citizens.”
South African lawyers asked the International Court of Justice on Thursday to order an immediate halt to Israeli military operations in Gaza, the besieged coastal territory that is home to 2.3 million Palestinians. A decision on that request will probably take weeks, though the full case is likely to last years — and it’s unclear whether Israel would follow any court orders.
On Friday, Israel focused on the brutality of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, presenting chilling video and audio to a hushed audience to highlight what happened that day.
“They tortured children in front of parents and parents in front of children, burned people, including infants, alive, and systematically raped and mutilated scores of women, men and children,” Becker said.
South Africa’s request, he said, amounts to an attempt to prevent Israel from defending against that assault.
Even when acting in selfdefense, countries are required by international law to follow the rules of war, and the court must decide if Israel has. As the two days of hearings ended Friday, court President Joan E. Donoghue said the court would rule on the request for urgent measures “as soon as possible.”
Israel often boycotts international tribunals and U.N. investigations, saying they are unfair and biased. But this time, Israeli leaders have taken the rare step of sending a high-level legal team — a sign of how seriously they regard the case and probably their fear that any court order to halt operations would be a major blow to the country’s international standing.
Becker dismissed the accusations as crude and attention-seeking.
“We live at a time when words are cheap in an age of social media and identity politics. The temptation to reach for the most outrageous term to vilify and demonize has become, for many, irresistible,” he said.
He said the charges Israel is facing should be leveled at Hamas, which seeks Israel’s destruction and which the U.S. and Western allies consider a terrorist group.
“If there have been acts that may be characterized as genocidal, then they have been perpetrated against Israel,” Becker said.
In a statement from New York, Gilad Erdan, Israeli ambassador to the U.N., called the case a “new moral low” and said that by taking it on, “the U.N. and its institutions have become weapons in service of terrorist organizations.” More than 23,000 people in Gaza have been killed during the military campaign, according to the Health Ministry in the territory, which is run by Hamas. Nearly 85% of Gaza’s people have been driven from their homes, a quarter of the territory’s residents face starvation and much of northern Gaza has been reduced to rubble.
South Africa says this amounts to genocide and is part of decades of Israeli oppression of Palestinians.
“The scale of destruction in Gaza, the targeting of family homes and civilians, the war being a war on children — all make clear that genocidal intent is both understood and has been put into practice. The articulated intent is the destruction of Palestinian life,” lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi said Thursday, adding that several leading Israeli politicians had made dehumanizing comments about people in Gaza.
The Palestinian Authority’s Foreign Ministry welcomed the case, saying in a written statement that South Africa “delivered unequivocal evidence that Israel is deliberately and systematically violating its obligations under the Genocide Convention.”
Malcolm Shaw, an international law expert on Israel’s legal team, rejected the accusation of genocidal intent and described the remarks that Ngcukaitobi referred to as “random quotes not in conformity with government policy.”
Israel also says it takes measures to protect civilians, such as issuing evacuation orders ahead of strikes. It blames Hamas for the high civilian death toll, saying the group uses residential areas to stage attacks and for other military purposes.
Israel’s critics say that such measures have done little to prevent the high death toll and that its bombings are so powerful they often amount to indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks.
If the court issues an order to halt the fighting and Israel doesn’t comply, it could face U.N. sanctions, although those may be blocked by a veto from the United States, Israel’s staunch ally. In Washington, National Security Council spokesman John Kirby called the allegations “unfounded.”
The extraordinary case goes to the core of one of the world’s most intractable conflicts — and for a second day, protesters rallied outside the court.
Pro-Israeli demonstrators set up a table near the court grounds for a Sabbath meal with empty seats commemorating the hostages still being held by Hamas. “We want to symbolize the empty chairs, because we are missing them,” said Nathan Bouscher from the Center for Information and Documentation on Israel.
Nearby, more than 100 pro-Palestinian protesters waved flags and chanted.
The case also strikes at the heart of Israel’s and South Africa’s national identities.
Israel was founded as a Jewish state in the wake of the Nazis’ slaughter of 6 million Jews during World War II. South Africa’s governing party, meanwhile, has long compared Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank to its own history under the apartheid regime of white minority rule, which restricted most Black people to “homelands.”