The top UN court will consider South Africa’s claim that Israel committed genocide in Gaza

Initial hearings on South Africa’s request for judges to impose an emergency halt on Israel’s military operations begin on Thursday at the highest court of the United Nations, setting up a legal fight over whether Israel’s assault against Hamas in Gaza qualifies as genocide. Israel vehemently refutes the accusation of genocide.

The lawsuit, the outcome of which is probably going to take years, goes right to the core of Israel’s national character as a Jewish state founded in the wake of the Holocaust’s Nazi atrocities. It also has to do with South Africa’s identity: the country’s governing African National Congress party has long drawn parallels between Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank and its own past as a white minority country that confined the majority of Black people to “homelands” until it was overthrown in 1994.

Normally, Israel views international and U.N. courts as biased and unjust. However, in order to justify its military action, which was started in response to the Hamas strikes on October 7, it is sending a formidable legal team to the International Court of Justice. “I believe their motivation is to be cleared and to believe they can fight the charges of genocide,” said Juliette McIntyre, a University of South Australia specialist on international law.

“Immediately take action to protect the Palestinian people and call on Israel, the occupying power, to halt its onslaught against the Palestinian people, in order to ensure an objective legal resolution,” the foreign ministry of the Palestinian Authority urged the court in a statement following the filing of the case. South Africa’s attorneys begin two days of preliminary hearings at the International Court of Justice by outlining to the judges their country’s accusations against Israel in the Gaza war, including “acts and omissions” that are “genocidal in character,” and their demand that Israel immediately cease its military operations.

The main topic of discussion at Thursday’s first session is South Africa’s request that the court issue enforceable temporary orders, one of which is for Israel to cease its military operations. It will probably take weeks to decide. The Health Ministry in Gaza, which is governed by Hamas, reports that over 23,200 Palestinians have died as a result of Israel’s attack. Health experts estimate that women and children make up around two thirds of the deceased. There is no distinction made in the death toll between fighters and civilians.

About 1,200 people were murdered by Palestinian militants in the Oct. 7 onslaught, which saw Hamas overpower Israel’s defenses and sweep into several villages; the majority of the victims were civilians. About half of the other 250 people they kidnapped have since been freed. On a Tuesday visit to Tel Aviv, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected the argument as “meritless.” The fact that the groups fighting Israel—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Iran, their ally—continue to demand the destruction of Israel and the mass slaughter of Jews, he continued, makes it more aggravating.

The international court that settles international disputes has never found a nation to be accountable for genocide. The ruling in 2007 that Serbia “violated the obligation to prevent genocide” in relation to the July 1995 slaughter of over 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb troops was the closest it got.

According to McIntyre, South Africa “will have a hard time getting over the threshold” of establishing genocide. She said, “It’s not just a matter of killing enormous numbers of people,” in an email correspondence with The Associated Press. “A group of people (categorized by race or religion, for example) must be intended to be destroyed, in whole or in part, in a specific location.”

South Africa claims that Israel has shown that purpose in an extensive 84-page document that initiated the action in the latter part of last year. In response, Israel said that it follows international law, that it targets Hamas only with its military might, and that the people living in Gaza are not its enemies. It claimed to take action to reduce injury to people and permit the entry of humanitarian assistance into the region.

The South African case was described as a “despicable and contemptuous exploitation” of the court in a statement from the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The 1948 genocide convention, which was drafted in the wake of World War II, and the Holocaust, which claimed the lives of six million Jews, are at the center of the ICJ case. South Africa and Israel are signatories.

South Africa claims in its written submission that it went to the court in order to “ensure the urgent and fullest possible protection for Palestinians in Gaza who remain at grave and immediate risk of continuing and further acts of genocide” as well as “to establish Israel’s responsibility for violations of the Genocide Convention; to hold it fully accountable under international law for those violations.”

Three hours of arguments will be presented by a team of South African attorneys in the international court’s wood-paneled Great Hall of Justice. On Friday morning, Israel’s legal team will have three hours to dispute the accusations. Former leader of the opposition in the United Kingdom, Jeremy Corbyn, whose left-of-center Labour Party leadership was marred by accusations of antisemitism, will be traveling with South Africa’s delegation. He has long been an outspoken opponent of Israel and a supporter of the Palestinian cause.

According to Human Rights Watch, the hearings will scrutinize Israel’s activities in a U.N. tribunal. Balkees Jarrah, the organization’s assistant director of international justice, said that “South Africa’s genocide case unlocks a legal process at the world’s highest court to credibly examine Israel’s conduct in Gaza in the hopes of curtailing further suffering.”

International disputes are handled by the U.N. court, which has its headquarters at the elaborate Peace Palace in a green neighborhood of The Hague. The International Criminal Court, situated in the same Dutch city only a short distance away, brings cases against people for crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide. Next month, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) will resume proceedings over a request made by the United Nations for a non-binding advisory judgment about the legitimacy of Israeli policy in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem.