Brett Wilkins
Common Dreams / October 28, 2024
“The glaring genocide in Gaza is there for all who are not blinded by prejudice to see.”
South Africa filed 750 pages of “overwhelming” proof that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands on Monday, the deadline for submitting final evidence in the ongoing trial.
South African Ambassador to the Netherlands Vusi Madonsela delivered the legal document—known as a memorial—to the ICJ headquarters in the Dutch city. Under the court’s rules, the contents of the memorial cannot be made public at this time.
According to a statement from the office of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, the memorial is a “comprehensive presentation of the overwhelming evidence of genocide in Gaza.”
The office said the document “contains evidence which shows how the government of Israel has violated the Genocide Convention by promoting the destruction of Palestinians living in Gaza, physically killing them with an assortment of destructive weapons, depriving them access to humanitarian assistance, causing conditions of life which are aimed at their physical destruction, and ignoring and defying several provisional measures of the International Court of Justice, and using starvation as a weapon of war and to further Israel’s aims to depopulate Gaza through mass death and forced displacement of Palestinians.”
“The evidence will show that undergirding Israel’s genocidal acts is the special intent to commit genocide, a failure by Israel to prevent incitement to genocide, to prevent genocide itself, and its failure to punish those inciting and committing acts of genocide,” Ramaphosa’s office added.
South Africa’s filing comes amid Israel’s ongoing 387-day assault on Gaza, which according to Palestinian and international agencies has killed at least 43,020 people—most of them women and children. At least 101,110 others have been wounded and over 10,000 Gazans are missing and believed dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed homes and other structures. Millions more Palestinians have been forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened by Israel’s invasion and “complete siege” of Gaza.
The filing also comes one week after senior members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right Cabinet and national lawmakers spoke at a conference advocating the ethnic cleansing and recolonization of Gaza.
Ramaphosa’s office lamented that “Israel has been granted unprecedented impunity to breach international law and norms for as long as the United Nations Charter has been in existence.”
“Israel’s continued shredding of international law has imperilled the institutions of global governance that were established to hold all states accountable,” the presidency’s statement asserted. “The glaring genocide in Gaza is there for all who are not blinded by prejudice to see.”
Ramaphosa’s statement continues:
The Palestinian struggle against imperialism, Israeli apartheid, and settler colonialism is the daily reality of the Palestinian people. Since 1948, they have faced various forms of colonization, often backed by historical colonial powers and, more recently, by states intent on shaping a world order in their interests. The global fight against settler colonialism persists in some parts of the world, including in occupied Palestine, both in Gaza and the West Bank. The international community cannot stand idly by while innocent civilians—including women, children, hospital workers, humanitarian aid workers, and journalists—are killed for simply being. That is a world we cannot accept.
“We reiterate our appeal for an immediate cease-fire in Palestine, in Lebanon, and entire region, and the start of a political process to ensure a just and lasting peace,” Ramaphosa’s office added.
South Africa also thanked the more than 30 countries and regional blocs, including the African Union and Arab League, that are supporting its case.
It could take years for the ICJ to deliver judgment in the case. In July, the tribunal issued a nonbinding advisory opinion that Israel’s occupation of Palestine—including the West Bank, Eastern Jerusalem, Gaza, and Syrian Golan Heights—is an illegal form of apartheid that must end “as rapidly as possible.”
South Africa’s filing came on the same day that Francesca Albanese, the U.N. special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, published a report on Israeli “genocide as colonial erasure” in Palestine.
Israel vehemently denies it is committing genocide in Gaza, a position shared by the Biden administration, the country’s main benefactor.
Palestine advocates welcomed Monday’s filing, with Council on American-Islamic Relations national executive director Nihad Awad thanking South African leaders “for helping expose the far-right Israeli government’s genocide and genocidal intent in Gaza to the world community.”
“This detailed submission also further exposes the Biden administration’s criminal complicity with Israel’s genocide in Gaza,” Awad added. “President [Joe] Biden should end his complicity with genocide by stopping arms deliveries to Israel and forcing an immediate cease-fire.”
The Biden administration and Congress have provided Israel with tens of billions of dollars’ worth of armed aid and diplomatic cover to continue its war.
Francis Boyle, a professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, noted that “Israel has violated three prior orders from the court” and “has also violated the decision on Rafah of May.”
“Just after that decision, Biden put out his ridiculous statement that Israel had agreed to a cease-fire, which it obviously didn’t,” he continued. “The Biden administration’s phony ‘cease-fire negotiations’ manoeuvres have simply bought Israel more time to commit more crimes, including its recent annihilation of northern Gaza.”
“Given Israel’s lack of respect for decisions of the court, it becomes imperative that these decisions have teeth,” Boyle added. “The U.S. veto at the U.N. Security Council has prevented that body from doing its job. So, the U.N. General Assembly should utilize its Uniting for Peace procedure to take control of the situation and recommend an arms embargo and economic sanctions against Israel as well as other measures. That’s what was done to apartheid South Africa because of its illegal occupation of Namibia.”
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams
