Judges and parties stand at the opening of the hearings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands, Thursday, Jan. 11, 2024.
On Thursday, lawyers representing the government of South Africa gave extraordinary arguments before the International Court of Justice in The Hague, arguing that Israel is guilty of perpetrating genocide in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The factual material that was contained in the presentations, followed throughout the world, has a significance that goes beyond the character and motives of the governments and institutions involved in the proceedings. It gathered into one place a catalogue of systematic atrocities and war crimes perpetrated by Israel since October 7, which the whole world has followed to varying degrees on social media.
As Irish lawyer Blinne Nà Ghrálaigh stated in her presentation, Gaza represents “the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate—so far vain—hope that the world might do something.”
This objective catalogue of atrocities and war crimes was tied together with the genocidal rhetoric coming directly out of the mouths of Israeli state officials, military leaders, and other leading personalities.
The presentations described callous and systematic brutality reminiscent of the Nazis, on the one hand, and bloodthirsty racist incitement reminiscent of the Nazis, on the other hand. On this basis, the attorneys invoked the 1948 Genocide Convention, which was introduced and ratified in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
Adila Hassim, a South African High Court advocate, made the first of the substantive presentations on Thursday. “For the past 96 days,” she said, “Israel has subjected Gaza to what has been described as one of the heaviest conventional bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare.”
“Palestinians in Gaza are subjected to relentless bombing wherever they go,” she argued, pointing to evidence that they are “killed in their homes, in places where they seek shelter, in hospitals, in schools, in mosques, in churches and as they try to find food and water for their families. They have been killed if they failed to evacuate, in the places to which they have fled and even while they attempted to flee along Israeli declared safe routes.”
“The level of killing is so extensive that those whose bodies are found are buried in mass graves, often unidentified,” she continued. “More than 1,800 Palestinian families in Gaza have lost multiple family members and hundreds of multigenerational families have been wiped out, with no remaining survivors — mothers, fathers, children, siblings, grandparents, aunts, cousins — often all killed together. This killing is nothing short of destruction of Palestinian life. It is inflicted deliberately. No one is spared, not even newborn babies.”
Alongside the tens of thousands killed, she pointed to tens of thousands more maimed, disfigured and traumatized. Meanwhile, large numbers of Palestinian civilians, including children, are being “arrested, blindfolded, forced to undress and loaded onto trucks, taken to unknown locations.”
Referring to Israel’s “evacuation” order from northern Gaza in the opening stages of the military onslaught, Hassim argued, “The order itself was genocidal. It required immediate movement, taking only what could be carried, while no humanitarian assistance was permitted, and fuel, water and food and other necessities of life had deliberately been cut off. It was clearly calculated to bring about the destruction of the population.”
A key feature of Israel’s genocidal operation was, Hassim argued, its deliberate “assault on Gaza’s healthcare system.”