Palestinian representatives told the International Court of Justice (ICJ) yesterday (Monday) that there must be an immediate, unconditional and total end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

They stated that the occupation was illegal and said the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination was non-negotiable.

The Palestine representatives were making submissions on the first of six days of hearings at the ICJ in The Hague.

The hearings are in response to the request by the General Assembly of the United Nations for an advisory opinion “in respect of the legal consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem”.

Palestine’s Foreign Minister, Riyad al-Maliki, told the court: “I stand before you as the entire Palestinian people continue to be denied their fundamental rights, their very existence negated.

“For over a century, the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination has been denied and violated.”

Riyad al-Maliki making his submission.

Palestine was not a land without a people, Al-Maliki said. “It was not, as Israeli leaders have described it, a wasteland. There was life on this land. There was a political life, a cultural life, a social life, a religious life,” he said.

“It had schools and universities, cinemas and cultural halls. It had villages and villagers, families and communities, whose life was disrupted by the impact of a promise made thousands of miles away over a hundred years ago.”

For decades, Al-Maliki said, the Palestinians had endured both colonialism and apartheid.

“There are those who are outraged by the use of these words,” Al-Maliki said. “They should instead be outraged by the reality we are living.

“This reality is known by every Palestinian, suffered by millions, generation after generation. It is the reality of the expulsion of the Palestinian people from their own land, not just during the 1948 Nakba, which led to the expulsion of up to 900,000 Palestinians; not just the expulsion of more than 400,000 Palestinians in 1967, but continually, including now. As I address you at this very moment, it is the indiscriminate maiming and killing of Palestinians.

“It means you can spend the entirety of your life as a refugee, denied your dignity and your right to return home. It means your life and family, your community and home, are under constant threat.

“Your loved ones can be taken away and thrown in an Israeli jail, held there indefinitely. Your land can be stolen, colonised, and annexed without hesitation.

“Freedom is nowhere to be found. There is no safe haven. It means discrimination everywhere, and no justice anywhere.”

Al-Maliki said there was genocide underway in Gaza that was a result of decades of impunity and inaction.

“It is a reality where Israel can destroy Gaza, killing tens of thousands of Palestinians, almost half of them children, leaving one million children starved, terrorised and traumatised for life; orphaned of a mother, a father both; amputated and disabled; leaving nearly two million people displaced and desperate with nowhere to shelter from the onslaught.”

Ending Israel’s impunity was a moral, political, and legal imperative, Al-Maliki said.

“Successive Israeli governments have given the Palestinian people only three options: displacement, subjugation, or death. These are the choices: ethnic cleansing, apartheid, or genocide,” he told the court.

“But our people are here to stay. They have a right to live in freedom and dignity in their ancestral land. They will not forsake their rights.”

Al-Maliki said he was appealing to the court “to uphold our rights to self- determination, return, and all other human rights, including by declaring that the Israeli occupation is illegal and must end immediately, totally, and unconditionally”.

He showed four maps that indicate the shrinking of Palestinian territories.

Al-Maliki also showed a photograph of a fifth map that the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, displayed at the United Nations General Assembly in September last year.

“There is no Palestine at all on this map, only Israel comprised of all the land from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” Al-Maliki told the court. “This shows you what the prolonged, continuous Israeli occupation of Palestine is intended to accomplish: the complete disappearance of Palestine and the destruction of the Palestinian people.”

The Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, was overcome by emotion as he spoke about children in Palestine.

“The state of Palestine appeals to this court to guide the international community in upholding international law, ending injustice, and achieving a just and lasting peace; to guide us towards a future in which Palestinian children are treated as children, not as a demographic threat; in which the identity of the group to which we belong does not diminish the human rights to which we are all entitled; a future in which no Palestinian and no Israeli is killed; a future in which two states live side by side in peace and security,” Mansour said.

“The future of freedom, justice, and peace can begin here and now. It is within your power to give the clearest statement possible on what the law is, what it requires, and what it means in practice for all members of the United Nations.”

Mansour (pictured below, making his submission) said the UN General Assembly brought the question of Palestine before the court “because our people, the law, and peace are in jeopardy”.

Israel was continually breaching the law, Mansour said, and this breach, he said, had now reached its most inhumane levels.

“More than two million Palestinians in Gaza are being pushed all the way to the border, to the very brink.

“Palestinian children, women, and men consumed by disease, despair, destruction and death, which are spreading like wildfire.

In the rest of occupied Palestine, he said, settlers rampaged and terrorised Palestinians.

“They speak openly of getting rid of the Palestinian people one way or another. They defy the law and the law is barely fighting back,” Mansour said.

Lawyer and author Philippe Sands said Israel’s occupation of Palestine was illegal and “must be brought to an immediate, unconditional, and total end”.

Sands said the right of self-determination required that UN member states bring Israel’s occupation to an immediate end: “no aid, no assistance, no complicity, no contribution to forcible actions, no money, no arms, no trade, no nothing”.

All UN members were obliged by law to end Israel’s presence on the territory of Palestine, Sands (pictured below) said.

Fifty-two states and three international organisations have expressed their intention to participate in the hearings.

Today (Tuesday) there are scheduled to be submissions by South Africa, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Bangladesh, and Belgium.

Israel will not present oral arguments during the hearings. It sent in a written statement in July last year in which it says that the request for the ICJ’s advisory opinion “perversely seeks to circumvent the lack of Israel’s consent”.

It says there are “glaring failings” in the questions brought before the court and a risk of the ICJ proceedings “fundamentally delegitimizing the established legal framework governing the conflict and any prospect of negotiations between Israelis and the Palestinians which, Israel says, remains “the only viable path to peace”.

Israel added: “While the request made to the Court seeks to portray it as such, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a cartoon narrative of villain and victim in which there are no Israeli rights and no Palestinian obligations.

“Entertaining such a falsehood can only push the parties further apart rather than help create conditions to bring them closer together. For all the difficulties and obstacles that exist, Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation will not be served by further undermining the core understanding that this is a tragic conflict in which two sides – not just one –have rights and responsibilities.”

Israel said that to engage with the subject matter of the request placed before the ICJ “would not just be unwarranted; it would be harmful”.

The Office of the Prime Minister of Israel stated yesterday that Israel did not recognise the legitimacy of the ICJ proceedings regarding “the legality of the occupation” and said they were an effort designed to infringe on Israel’s right to defend itself against “existential threats”.

Netanyahu’s office said the proceedings in The Hague were “part of the Palestinian attempt to dictate the results of the political settlement without negotiations”.

Spokesperson for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs Lior Haiat said: “By hurling false accusations and creating a fundamentally distorted reality, the Palestinian Authority is trying to turn a conflict that should be resolved through direct negotiations and without external impositions into a one-sided and improper legal process designed to adopt an extremist and distorted narrative according to which the Palestinians have no responsibilities and Israel has no rights, which has nothing to do with justice.”

The hearings are separate from the case brought to the ICJ by South Africa, in which South Africa alleges that Israel has violated the Genocide Convention in Gaza.

Amnesty International said yesterday that Israel must end its “brutal” occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

The NGO’s secretary-general, Agnès Callamard, said Israel’s occupation of Palestine was “the longest and one of the most deadly military occupations in the world”.

For decades, Callamard said, the occupation had been characterised by widespread and systematic human rights violations against Palestinians.

“The occupation has also enabled and entrenched Israel’s system of apartheid imposed on Palestinians,” Callamard said.

“Over the years, Israel’s military occupation has evolved into a perpetual occupation in flagrant violation of international law.”

In July 2004 the ICJ issued an advisory opinion on “the legal consequences of the construction of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.

The court ruled, by 14 votes to one, that “the construction of the wall being built by Israel, the occupying Power, in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, and its associated régime, are contrary to international law”.

The ICJ ruled that Israel was under an obligation “to cease forthwith the works of construction of the wall”, to “dismantle the structure therein situated”, and “to repeal or render ineffective forthwith all legislative and regulatory acts relating thereto”.

It also ruled that Israel was under an obligation to make reparation for all damage caused by the construction of the wall.

The UN General Assembly later voted overwhelmingly to demand that Israel comply with the court’s ruling.

The wall continues to cut through and divide Palestinian communities.

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