Ten months ago, South Africa filed a complaint against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) for the crime of genocide in the Gaza Strip, in what is shaping up to be one of the most unusual and unusual cases in recent history. be.
An anomaly given that Israel was born in the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust (the mass atrocities for which the word “genocide” was coined), South Africa currently has an October 28 deadline to submit final archives. It is also unusual because the government is requesting an extension of the evidence. Plaintiffs almost always seek to expedite rather than delay court proceedings.
The request for an extension indicates that South Africa has not been able to unearth enough legally convincing evidence to secure a victory in court. It also reviews the evidence presented so far and explains why South Africa, a country on another continent with a small Muslim population, could argue that Israel could be accused of “the crime of all crimes”. It also emphasizes the need to understand how strongly one wants something.
South Africa, in response to Israel’s counter-invasion of Gaza in the wake of Hamas’s October 7 orgy of bloodshed, rape and arson, used the United Nations-recognized Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (November 1948). 9th) and repeatedly violated the law. It resulted in the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust.
The Convention, which was adopted verbatim by the ICJ, defines “genocide” in five specific ways: It is defined as the commission of one or more war crimes. Legal scholar Malcolm Shaw has published a ruling on South Africa’s request for an order to stop Israel’s attack on Rafah in the Gaza Strip, as part of a larger lawsuit that South Africa has brought against Israel in the courts of The Hague. ICJ). Genocide, The Hague, Net (Credit: JOHANNA GERON/REUTERS)
The first is to kill someone simply because they are a member of a group. The second is “causing serious physical or psychological harm to members of a group,” which anti-Israel scholars and legal experts now use to describe Israel’s retaliation against the terrorist organization Hezbollah as a war crime. It uses the term to describe pager attacks and claims that Israel is spreading genocide into Lebanon.
The remaining three war crimes listed in the treaty include inflicting “conditions of living calculated to cause physical destruction,” preventing childbirth, and child abduction.
Specifically, South Africa claimed that Israel intentionally killed 23,570 Gazans, based on daily death tolls published by Hamas’ health ministry. This figure was later revised by Hamas to 41,000.
Hamas fraudulent numbersEvery civilian killed during war is a tragedy. But Abraham Weiner, a statistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of many experts who are convinced that this number is bogus. Hamas publishes “fake daily numbers that fluctuate too little because they do not have a clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring numbers,” Winder wrote in the Jewish online magazine Tablet.
This figure claims that the IDF is responsible for all deaths in Gaza since October 7, including natural causes, which the CIA World Factbook puts at 2.9% per year, or approximately 6,200 deaths. . Hamas’ assassinations of looters, homosexuals, political opponents, and pacifists such as Islam Hijazi, head of the NGO Heal Palestine, are well documented. He is a Gazan whose car was fired with 90 bullets in September after he refused to hand over funds he had collected for aid to Hamas.
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Hamas’s figures also include deaths from comradely attacks. According to the IDF, one in five of the 9,100 rockets fired at Israel since October 7 have landed in the Gaza Strip. On October 17, a rocket fired by the rival Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad struck the parking lot of Al Ahly Hospital. Hamas immediately claimed that 500 people had been killed.
Tragically, Hamas’ death toll does not distinguish between non-combatants and combatants, and the latter cannot be included in the genocide charges. The IDF puts the number of Hamas soldiers killed during the operation at 17,000.
If this evidence is accepted as fact in court, the ratio of non-combatant to combatant deaths in the Gaza Strip will be reduced to nearly 1:2. This is much lower than the average death toll in modern warfare of 1:9.
South Africa also claims that Israel has taken steps to prevent Palestinian births through the destruction of “essential health services.” However, since October 7, 5,522 babies have been born in Gaza every month, according to the NGO Save the Children. This is even higher than Gaza’s pre-war annual birth rate of 4,783 people per month. And the IDF has bombed and raided several hospitals in Gaza, each time with evidence that Hamas has built tunnels and command centers beneath them, making them legitimate military targets. has been published.
Finally, South Africa claims that Israel “intended” genocide in Gaza, quoting senior Israeli officials such as Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (“we are fighting human animals”). “The State of Israel has no choice but to make Gaza temporarily or permanently uninhabitable,” said retired Major General Giora Eiland () and President Isaac Herzog. (“There are no innocent civilians in Gaza”).
Israeli Holocaust historian Omer Bartov warned that such statements “could easily be interpreted as indicating genocidal intent.” But they do not prove genocide occurred, and the conviction was based on evidence presented by South Africa, including the display of Israeli flags on destroyed buildings in the Gaza Strip. This means that it is a significant deviation from judicial precedent.
From Myanmar to East Timor, Syria and Iraq, in the 76 years since the Genocide Convention was introduced, dozens of genocide incidents have occurred that meet all five criteria. However, the United Nations and its courts have officially recognized only three cases of genocide: the Khmer Rouge’s massacre of 3 million Cambodians and their starvation. An estimated 800,000 Tutsis were killed by Hutus in Rwanda. and the extermination of 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica.
The lackluster performance is the result of a lack of political will. But when it comes to Israel, South Africa is resolute. Israel has long drawn parallels between its historic fight against apartheid and the Palestinian cause, and is seeking to restore the ties its military shared with South Africa’s apartheid-era regime.
Is South Africa enabling genocide?
Since taking office in 1994, the ANC has been a promoter of genocide rather than a harbinger of global justice. The U.S. Embassy in South Africa says Russia has secretly provided weapons to Russia for the invasion of Ukraine, which the Washington, D.C.-based watchdog group Genocide Watch has classified as genocide.
In 2015, the ANC ignored an ICJ arrest warrant against then Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who oversaw the genocide of between 200,000 and 400,000 people in Darfur during a state visit to South Africa in the early 2000s.
Today, Sudan is the site of the world’s largest humanitarian disaster. According to Médecins Sans Frontières, more than 10 million people are displaced, 5.2 million women and children are starving, and sexual violence against women and girls has reached epidemic levels.
However, the ANC still refuses to raise an eyebrow.
In the same month that ANC prosecutors took Israel to the World Court, a beaming South African President Cyril Ramaphosa went to Pretoria with Sudanese general Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, whose militia killed 15,000 people belonging to the Masalit ethnic group last year. I took a photo at the official residence of They are a minority group and are believed to be involved in the Darfur genocide.
The only way to interpret that, according to Johannesburg-based think tank Brenthirst Foundation, is that South Africa has “some countries and leaders we like, and some countries and leaders we don’t like”. And Israel, the only country in the world with a Jewish majority, is the country they hate the most.
The author is a freelance journalist who has reported from conflict zones in Israel, Ukraine, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor.