Shira Rubin & Claire Parker
The Washington Post / April 28, 2025
The United Nations had asked the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for an advisory opinion on Israel’s obligations to facilitate aid under international law.
TEL AVIV — The United Nations’ top court held oral arguments Monday to determine whether Israel is required to allow the U.N. and other agencies to provide unhindered aid to Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The U.N. General Assembly had asked the International Court of Justice to issue an advisory opinion on Israel’s legal obligations under both the U.N. charter and international law. For nearly two months, Israel has blocked all aid from entering Gaza, and earlier this year, it banned the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, or UNRWA, from operating inside Israel and from communicating with Israeli officials.
“As an occupying power, the State of Israel must provide services or facilitate their delivery — including through UNRWA — to the population it is occupying,” the agency’s commissioner general, Philippe Lazzarini, said in a statement Monday as the proceedings were underway.
In Gaza in particular, the humanitarian crisis has once again reached catastrophic levels, with the World Food Program saying last week that it has simply run out of food to distribute.
Israeli foreign minister Gideon Saar on April 28 called the International Court of Justice hearings a “systematic persecution and delegitimization” of Israel.
Israel, however, refused to appear before the court at The Hague, which Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said has a political bias against the Jewish state. At a news conference in Jerusalem on Monday, he likened the hearings to a “circus” and said that “it is not Israel that should be on trial.”
“No [other] country is subject to such double standards,” he said.
Instead, Saar and other Foreign Ministry officials said it was UNRWA that should be in the hot seat, repeating claims that the agency was infiltrated by Hamas and other militants in Gaza. Israel has not made public evidence to substantiate its allegations that a significant number of UNRWA employees are tied to local terrorist groups.
In August, Lazzarini said he fired nine staff members after evidence, “if authenticated and corroborated,” indicated that they may have been involved in the Hamas-led attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, a brutal assault that sparked the Gaza war.
UNRWA was established in 1949 to help Palestinians who fled or were expelled from their homes during the creation of the state of Israel and continues to serve more than 5 million people across Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria.
The agency has long held a unique role in Gaza as the provider of aid and services for the majority of the population classified as refugees. As a result, UNRWA has an unparalleled logistics network in the enclave that it has leveraged for other aid agencies throughout the war.
Israel is now blocking all aid, including food and fuel, and has denied international U.N. personnel the necessary visas to operate in Israel and the Palestinian territories, Lazzarini said.
On Monday, the Palestinian ambassador to the Netherlands, Ammar Hijazi, told the court that Israel is violating international law in Gaza and the West Bank by weaponizing aid.
“Israel is starving, killing and displacing Palestinians while also targeting and blocking humanitarian organizations trying to save their lives,” he said. “All U.N.-supported bakeries in Gaza have been forced to shut their doors. Nine of every 10 Palestinians have no access to safe drinking water. Storage facilities of the U.N. and other international agencies are empty.”
“These are the facts,” he added. “Starvation is here. Humanitarian aid is being used as a weapon of war.”
Elinor Hammarskjöld, under-secretary-general of the U.N., said in an opening statement at the court that there is an “urgent need” for a ceasefire in Gaza so that humanitarian aid can reach civilians. “Israel has the obligation to render assistance to such activities of the United Nations,” she said.
More than 52,000 people have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of the dead are women and children.
In a rare rebuke, President Donald Trump said Friday that he pushed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to open access points for aid delivery to Gaza.
“Gaza came up and I said, ‘We’ve got to be good to Gaza. … Those people are suffering,’” Trump said, speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One. “There’s a very big need for medicine, food and medicine, and we’re taking care of it.”
Shira Rubin is a journalist for The Washington Post based in Tel Aviv, covering news from Israel, the Palestinian territories and the region
Claire Parker is the Cairo bureau chief for The Washington Post, reporting from around the Middle East
Parker reported from Jerusalem
