The U.N. Security Council will decide Israel’s position on the issue of the Gaza Strip offensive, citing a Palestinian man named Abu Bakr Bashir
BERLIN – The United Nations’ top court is expected to issue an order on Friday on Israel’s offensive in the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, potentially ordering Israel to halt the operation.
South Africa was accused of being a legal arm of Hamas by the Israeli government, and it said it was not bound by the rulings of the court.
The Israeli government said in a statement that they wouldn’t do military activity in the area that could lead to the destruction of the Palestinian civilian population.
Since Israel began its offensive, almost a million Palestinians have fled to other countries. Before Israel’s current military offensive, an estimated 1.3 million Palestinians displaced from elsewhere in Gaza were sheltering there.
One concern among Israel’s leadership is that an injunction from the ICJ could precipitate a similar resolution by the U.N. Security Council, where Israel would rely on the United States to veto such a measure.
Khan is seeking warrants for Sinwar, Deif and Haniyeh on charges that include crimes against humanity including extermination, murder and sexual violence. It’s the first time that this charge of “starvation as a weapon of warfare” will be used in an international court.
Rob and Daniel both reported from Tel Aviv. The story was written by Anas Baba in the Gaza Strip. A man named Abu Bakr Bashir made a contribution to The Hague. Hadeel Al-Shalchi donated in Tel Aviv.
That possibility was echoed after the court ruling by Josep Borrell, the top diplomat for the European Union, who asked what position the EU would now take toward Israel. We will have to decide between our support to the rule of law or our support to Israel,” he said.
The Israeli–Israeli Interaction in Gaza After the March 7 Israeli Insurrection: Palestinians are Outraged by the Hague Court’s Decision
In protest, Egypt has halted shipments of aid through its border with Gaza. On May 21 the UN stopped delivering food in Rafah because of lack of supplies, and reported a surge in diseases from mass displacement due to a lack of basic supplies.
Outside the courtroom in the Hague, pro-Palestinian demonstrators told NPR they were disappointed with the court’s decision because it stopped short of calling for a total end to Israel’s Gaza offensive.
“Netanyahu will not respect anyone,” said Abu Issa, who is sheltering in the ruins of a damaged school in the decimated city of Khan Younis. He doesn’t respect the decisions of the court. Netanyahu doesn’t care about anyone, and that’s why the decisions are all empty words.”
The court’s decision was welcomed by both the Hamas government in Gaza and President Abbas’s government in the West Bank. But Mahmoud Abu Issa, a Rafah resident who fled the Israeli incursion in May, said he doubted Israel would abide by it.
Opposition leader Yair Lapid, a centrist, called the court’s decision a “moral disaster” by not ordering the return of Israeli hostages held by Hamas since its Oct. 7 attack on southern Israel, which sparked the ongoing war.
An hour after the court ruling, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a phone meeting to consult Israel’s top legal official and senior government ministers and officials, Netanyahu’s office said.
Palestinians in the western part of the city reported one of the most intensive Israeli bombardments there since troops entered in May. The Palestinian journalists said Israeli airstrikes on a main road cut off access to a hospital that had been mostly evacuated but still had a medical team inside. The Israeli military did not make a comment immediately.
Reading out the court’s ruling from the bench of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Court President Nawaf Salam noted that provisional measures ordered by the court earlier this year have not fully addressed the situation in Gaza and that conditions, particularly in Rafah, have deteriorated further.
Salam cited a report by the United Nations International Children’s Fund that estimated about half of 1.2 million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah were children, and he warned that “military operations there would result in, I quote, the few remaining basic services and infrastructure they need to survive being totally destroyed.”
Yuval Shany, an international law expert at the Hebrew University and senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, says the court’s ruling left enough ambiguity to allow Israel to continue its offensive there.
The 15-judge panel has issued preliminary orders to rein in the death toll and create pathways for aid in Gaza three times this year.
Pressure from Palestine is creating a tremendous sense of pressure in the 21st century: Israel vs. Turkey, Bolivia, and Colombia
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“This is not North Korea or Belarus or Myanmar levels of isolation — but it is isolation,” said Alon Pinkas, Israel’s former consul general in New York. “It creates a tremendous sense of pressure.”
Three European countries took a step towards recognizing Palestine as a state in the same week that the order came. It also followed widespread university campus protests in the United States against Israel’s campaign in Gaza, as well as decisions by Turkey to suspend trade with Israel and by Belize, Bolivia and Colombia to break diplomatic ties with Israel.
In 2011, a former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, warned that Israel faced a “diplomatic-political tsunami” of censure if its conflict with the Palestinians went unresolved, as peace talks faltered and revolution spread across the Middle East.