Written By: Holly Pulley, Staff Writer
DESERVED: South Africa files a case against Israel and their recent endeavors in Palestine.
The date October 7, 2023 is one that has been burned into our brains, as the day of Hamas’ deadly attack on Israel which resulted in almost 1,200 deaths. This event was the start of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, and since that day, the Israeli government has committed 25,000 documented deaths of Palestinians, more than half of them being children. On December 29, 2023, the South African government filed a case to the International Court of Justice charging Israel with the genocide of Palestinians since October 7 and called for a ceasefire and increase in humanitarian aid in Palestine.
Israel’s actions have been in direct violation of the Genocide Convention of 1948, which essentially states that genocide is illegal internationally. One of the biggest controversies of this charge is the charge itself; many people believe that Israel’s actions do not fit the title of “genocide”, since Israel has a right to defend itself against the “monsters” that are Hamas, according to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Butto defend that claim, one would have to find the definition of genocide according to the Genocide Convention. There are five components, straight from the United Nations:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Since October 7, Israel has destroyed every single hospital in Gaza (violation of #4), killed 25,000 people (violation of #1), stopped humanitarian aid from entering Gaza (violation of #3), and displaced multiple millions of people (violation of #3 and #5). Based on these incidents, South Africa’s charges seem to be justified. The stage of the hearing lasted two days, the first day concerning South Africa’s reasons for this trial, and the second day was Israel’s defense.
“The inevitable fatalities and human suffering of any conflict is not of itself a pattern of conduct that plausibly shows genocidal intent,” stated Israel’s representative, Chris Stalker. Wars mean death, and though one side of the “war” has disproportionately killed more people than the other, the Israeli government feels they are entitled to their handling of this conflict. South Africa’s Justice Minister Ronald Lamola commented during his time that “Violence and destruction in Palestine and Israel did not begin on the 7th of Oct. 2023, the Palestinians have experienced systematic oppression and violence for the last 76 years,” and that no attack against any country could justify the atrocities that have happened in Palestine, or that breach the Genocide Convention. South Africa has also used evidence of Palestinian displacement, Israel’s deliberate targeting of hospitals that have been proven to not hold Hamas members, and video proof of Israel Defence Forces “Joyfully detonating entire apartment blocks and town squares,” which South African lawyer Adila Hassim touched on during the hearing.
It seems like the Israeli government doesn’t have any supported evidence that is worth talking about, and that is because they don’t. They continue to compare their actions to other genocides. Christopher Staker says that since the ICJ did nothing to stop the Bosnian Genocide of 1992-1995, so the ICJ should not “depart from that case law.” The ICJ, at the time, declared the killing of 100,000 Bosniaks to be the Serbs defending itself against the Bosniaks who wanted an independent Bosnian country, and who “incited ethnic hatred” by wanting their own, safe country.
The International Court of Justice will declare if a ceasefire and an immediate pull-out of Israeli forces from Palestine is justified on Friday, January 26, 2024. If the ICJ declares these two things to happen, this could mean a lot for the liberation of smaller, forgotten, and used countries everywhere, like the DRC and its ongoing modern-day slavery crisis that has not been discussed enough, or Sudan facing its own ethnic cleansing and displacement of millions of people because of a war that has continued for over a year.