Hague: A top UN court opened hearings on Thursday in a case in which South Africa demands an emergency suspension of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
South Africa told ICJ that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza and pleaded with the court to urgently order Israel to halt its military operation. South African lawyers said the latest Gaza war is part of a decades-long oppression of the Palestinians by Israel.
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“Our opposition to the ongoing slaughter of the people of Gaza has driven us as a country to approach the ICJ,” South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has said of the genocide accusations, rejected by Israel and its top backer, the United States.
Israel has rejected the accusations of genocide as baseless and accused Pretoria of playing “advocate of the devil” for Hamas, the Palestinian resistance group it is waging war against in Gaza.
South Africa and Israel are both parties to the 1948 Genocide Convention, which obliges them to not commit genocide and also to prevent and punish it.
The treaty defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
The Israeli offensive has laid much of the densely populated Gaza Strip to waste, and nearly all its 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes at least once, causing a humanitarian catastrophe.
