Israel must be stopped from wiping Gaza off the map, South Africa argued in an urgent appeal to the International Court of Justice to stop the war and prevent the IDF from making the enclave uninhabitable.
“Israel’s declared aim of wiping Gaza from the map is about to be realized,” British attorney Vaughan Lowe told the ICJ during a hearing at The Hague.
“The court is not powerless,” Lowe said as he urged it to assert both its authority and that of international humanitarian law.
South Africa at the ICJ
“In order to secure the entry and distribution of food and humanitarian supplies, and to save lives, a halt to Israeli military operations across Gaza is essential,” Lowe stated.
The ICJ is already adjudicating South Africa’s charge, filed in December, that Israel violated the United Nations 1948 convention on the prevention of genocide.
In advance of those proceedings, the court held a hearing in January on a South African request for provisional measures. At the time the ICJ set aside South Africa’s demand that Israel halt the war, but ordered it to prevent any future possible genocidal acts and to ensure the immediate entry into the enclave of humanitarian assistance.
At issue in particular has been the high death toll, with Hamas reporting some 35,233 deaths, but verifying so far only 24,686 of those fatalities. Israel has reported killing 15,000 combatants in Gaza.
Israel had argued that it is fighting an existential war against a non-state terror group, Hamas, which invaded its country on October 7, killing over 1,200 people and seizing 252 hostages. It has rejected all charges of genocide, stressing that its military campaign targeted Hamas and was conducted within the bounds of international law.
South Africa turned back to the court in May, in an attempt to prevent Israel from conducting a military campaign in the southern city of Rafah close to the Egyptian border, which is one of the last areas in Gaza that has been largely untouched by the war.
Lowe told the ICJ that its previous orders in January had not been effective.
“It has become increasingly clear that Israel’s actions in Rafah are part of the end game in which Gaza is utterly destroyed as an area capable of human habitation,” Lowe said.
The Israeli army’s pending campaign there, “is the last step in the destruction of Gaza and its Palestinian people.”
He noted, however, that all Palestinians need protection against Israeli genocide.
“We’ve heard expressions of outrage that anyone could accuse Israel of acting in this way.
“We’ve heard assurances that Israel was doing everything in its power to avoid civilian deaths as it exercised its claimed right of self-defense, We’ve heard boasts that Israel’s army is the most moral in history.
“And we’ve heard denials that there is famine in Gaza. For months, people, particularly in the West have appeared unwilling to accept that the accusations are true. How could people who look like us and sound look like us, be possibly engaged in anything like genocide?” he asked.
The evidence, however, paints a different picture, he said, as he dismissed Israel’s claim that it had a right of self-defense against Hamas.
“The right of self-defense does not give a state a license to use unlimited violence,” Lowe said, adding that “No right of self-defense can ever extend to a right to inflict massive indiscriminate violence and starvation collectively, on an entire people.”
“Nothing, not self-defense or anything else, can ever justify genocide,” Lowe stressed.
He pointed out that the ICJ in 2004 had already stated that there is “no right of self-defense by an occupying state, against the territory that it occupies.”
In making the case for genocide, South African attorney Tembeka Ngcukaitobi provided multiple examples of Israeli hate speech against Palestinians in Gaza, citing examples from top Israeli politicians, IDF commanders, and soldiers in the field.
“Israeli soldiers in Gaza were filmed dancing, chanting and singing in November, ‘May their village burn, may Gaza be erased,’” he said.
“There is now a trend among the soldiers to film themselves committing atrocities against civilians in Gaza, in a form of ‘snuff’ video. One recorded himself detonating over 50 hours in Shejaia,” other soldiers were recorded singing, “We will destroy all of Khan Yunis and this house.”
South Africa’s attorney Max du Plessis said Israel’s declared safe zones were a “cruel distortion” because people were often too starved to flee. Those strong enough to leave to shelters were sometimes attacked by Israeli forces.
“There is nothing humanitarian about these humanitarian zones,” he said. “Israel’s genocide of Palestinians continues through military attacks and man-made starvation.”
Lowe said that Israel’s inability to see that it has done anything wrong is “grinding Gaza and its people into the dust.”
“It’s hard to think of a case in recent history which has been so important for the future of international law and of this court,” he said, adding that this was not the time for its judges “to be silent.”
Reuters contributed to this report.