South Africa contends that Israel is committing genocidal acts prohibited by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, better known as the Genocide Convention. As a signatory to the Genocide Convention, Israel has accepted the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s jurisdiction in enforcing it. And in the past, the ICJ has recognized that because states have an affirmative obligation to prevent genocide, any signatory to the Genocide Convention can bring claims against another signatory if they believe they are carrying out genocide.

In making the case that Israel had breached the Genocide Convention, South African lawyer Hassim recounted to the court the grim statistics of Israel’s slaughter. As of January 9, Israel had killed 23,210 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, with an additional 7,000 Palestinians missing, “presumed dead under the rubble.” One-third of those killed have been under eighteen, leading Gaza to be dubbed a graveyard for children.

An additional sixty thousand Gazans have been wounded or maimed, and as another member of South Africa’s legal team, Irish lawyer Blinne NíGhrálaigh, pointed out, many people have been wounded not once, but again and again. Each day in Israel’s assault, an average of ten Palestinian children have had one or both legs amputated. Given the siege to which Israel has subjected Gaza, most of these amputations are performed without anesthesia. Israel’s “genocidal assault,” NíGhrálaigh noted, had given birth to a “terrible new acronym”: WCNSF, for Wounded Child — No Surviving Family.

South Africa’s legal team documented not just the extent of the death and destruction, but the methods. Since the start of the war, Israel has dropped an average of six thousand bombs per week. It has unleashed two hundred or more two-thousand-pound bombs, including on refugee camps. Because Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas on Earth — over 80 percent of its inhabitants are refugees — Israel’s bombardment, one of the largest in modern history, has been shockingly deadly.

As Hassim told the court: Palestinians in Gaza are subjected to relentless bombing wherever they go. They are killed in their homes, in places where they seek shelter, in hospitals, in schools, in mosques, in churches and as they try to find food and water for their families. They have been killed if they failed to evacuate, in the places to which they have fled and even while they attempted to flee along Israeli declared “safe routes.”

It isn’t just the brutal bombing. Israel has also imposed on Gazans conditions that cannot sustain human life. The goal of such conditions, South Africa argues, is the physical destruction of the Palestinian people in whole or in part — i.e., genocide.

South Africa’s legal team cited several ways that Israel has made Gaza unlivable, including forcibly displacing Palestinians. Early in the war, Israel ordered over a million people, including those confined to hospitals, to immediately evacuate or be bombed. Over the course of the war, Israel has destroyed nearly 355,000 Palestinian homes. Israeli soldiers, Hassim told the court, have filmed “themselves joyfully detonating entire apartment blocks and town squares; erecting the Israeli flag over the wreckage seeking to re-establish Israeli settlements on the rubble of Palestinian homes.”

In addition to displacement, Israel’s brutal military campaign has inflicted starvation, dehydration, the spread of disease, and the collapse of Gaza’s already fragile health system. South Africa alleges that this has been deliberate. Not only is Israel making delivery of aid difficult through its extensive bombing, Israel, which controls the border crossing, is preventing sufficient levels of aid to arrive. Between December 26 and January 8, Israel on five separate occasions blocked the UN from ferrying medical supplies to Gaza’s hospitals — an assault on Gaza’s health care system.

While South Africa was arguing that Israel’s mass killings of Palestinians, its denial of aid, and attacks on health care infrastructure amounted to genocidal acts, Israel was carrying on with these very acts. The same day as South Africa’s oral arguments, Israel blocked UN humanitarian aid from entering Israel, denied a World Health Organization medical mission, and killed four Palestinian ambulance drivers, a killing that the Palestinian Red Crescent Society labelled intentional.

At this stage in the proceedings, the ICJ is not being asked to rule definitively whether Israel has carried out genocide. If past cases are any indicator, such a determination will take years. Under the Genocide Convention, the ICJ can and has ordered what are called “provisional measures.” In layman’s terms, the ICJ does not have to allow a party to perpetrate a likely genocide until a lengthy legal process takes place. Instead, under exceptional circumstances where there are plausible violations of the convention and grave urgency, they can order protections for the populations under assault.

While the merits will ultimately be decided later, South Africa clearly laid out the framework for the contention that Israel has committed genocide. Genocide is not just mass killing, something Israel’s unprecedented scale of destruction in Gaza certainly constitutes. It requires genocidal intent — that is, the perpetrator must intend to destroy a specific national, racial, religious, or ethnic group in whole or in part.

The case for genocidal intent was made by Tembeka Ngcukaitobi. His argument was twofold. First, Israel’s conduct is itself evidence of genocidal intent. After all, everyone knows what the outcome of dropping two-thousand-pound bombs on residential neighbourhoods, having snipers fire on civilians, targeting family homes, or ordering people to evacuate and then killing them as they flee will be.

Second, Ngcukaitobi put before the court the statements of Israel’s own political leaders, including, among many others, Israeli president Isaac Herzog (“this rhetoric about civilians not aware, not involved, is absolutely not true”) and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant (who has labelled Gazans human animals and said “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything”).

He played the infamous clip in which Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu tells soldiers to “remember what Amalek has done to you.” This is a reference to a Biblical story, in which God calls for Saul to retaliate against the Amalekites by killing their “men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.” Netanyahu repeated this command again in a letter to Israeli soldiers. The South African legal team also showed a widely circulated video of Israeli soldiers dancing and singing about how in Gaza, they would obey only one command: to “wipe off the seed of Amalek.”

Israel is attacking one of the most besieged people on the planet, a people who have been displaced, occupied, and assaulted long before the latest escalation in violence. It is able to do so, because it enjoys the support of the world’s most powerful country, the United States, which is willing to fund the slaughter and run cover for its perpetrators. The United States was the sole veto of a UN Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire.

For too long, too many have been willing to accept any crime committed by Israel, to tolerate any atrocity carried out against the Palestinian people. International institutions have repeatedly failed.

The ICJ now has a choice. It can order a halt to Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, the first step in finally achieving justice for Palestinians. Or it can implicitly accept the suffering that is unfolding in front of all of us. (Jacobin — IPA Service)