At the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague yesterday (Tuesday) representatives of ten countries made oral submissions on the second of six days of hearings about Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

More calls were made for an unconditional end to the occupation and there were appeals for the dismantling of Israel’s illegal settlements and an end to the apartheid suffered by the Palestinians.

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”.

South Africa’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Vusi Madonsela, told the ICJ that Israel’s occupation of Palestine had been conducted in “profound defiance” of international law and hundreds of UN resolutions with scant pushback from the international community.

Israel’s defiance of international law had already led to the killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians, including an estimated 30,000 killed in the past four months alone, Madonsela said.

“These are not mere statistics,” he said. “They are flesh and blood of the Palestinian people.

“Therefore, we must ask when will Israel’s decades-long impunity for widespread and systematic human rights violations and violations of peremptory norms of international law end if not now?”

The ferocity and violence of Israel’s latest military campaign against Gaza and its flouting of international law, including the January 26 order of the ICJ, clearly indicated that Israel considered itself unrestrained in its actions against Palestinians, Madonsela said.

He told the ICJ that Israel’s actions against Palestinians had recurred with “even more depravity and bloodshed”, being of such a serious nature as to lead the ICJ to find them plausibly genocidal.

“As I speak, and for each of the past 136 days, the world is witnessing in Gaza an assault that is unprecedented in speed and severity, violating the most basic precepts of the right to life and the survival of a population,” Madonsela said.

“The international community’s unwillingness to hold Israel accountable for its policies and practices, and its failure to ensure the immediate unconditional and total withdrawal of Israeli troops and an immediate end to Israel occupation and apartheid in Palestine, including Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, emboldens Israel to cross a further threshold, namely to commit the crime of crimes, genocide.”

Madonsela (pictured below) called for the dismantling of all Israel’s illegal settlements and an end to the apartheid suffered by the Palestinians.

The Palestinians had suffered “decades of apartheid settler colonialism”, he said.

The Palestinian cause was one that resonated strongly with the people of South Africa, Madonsela said. “That is because the Palestinian struggle evokes mournful memories of our own struggle against apartheid, segregation, and oppression,” he told the court.

“We as South Africans sense, see, hear, and feel to our core the inhumane discriminatory policies and practices of the Israeli regime as an even more extreme form of the apartheid that was institutionalised against black people in my country.”

Madonsela said it was clear that Israel’s illegal occupation was being administered in breach of the prohibition of the crime of apartheid. “It is indistinguishable from settler colonialism, which has no place in the 21st century,” he said.

“Israeli apartheid must end … The Palestinian people must be permitted to exercise their inalienable right to self-determination.”

Madonsela noted that, despite a ruling in 2004 about the legal consequences of the construction of a wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Palestinians in the West Bank, including many in East Jerusalem, continued to be contained behind a segregating wall.

“They continue to be subjected to discriminatory land zoning and planning policies, punitive and administrative house demolitions, and violent Israeli army incursions into their villages, towns and cities, and refugee camps, including Area A, which is supposed to be under full Palestinian control,” Madonsela told the court.

Palestinians in Gaza had meanwhile been living in a “sealed-off enclave, fragmented and segregated from the West Bank” and Palestinian refugees and exiles in the diaspora were systematically denied their right to return to their homes.

In July 2004 the ICJ 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.

Madonsela told the ICJ judges that Palestinians continued to be subjected to routine violent Israeli raids on their homes, with thousands of adults and children being subjected to unlawful arbitrary arrests by Israeli soldiers in the dead of night and indefinitely renewable internment, “internment without trial.”

Palestinians, including Palestinian children, were tried under military legislation by military judges, often themselves illegal settlers, in Israeli military courts without the basic protection of international humanitarian and human rights law, Madonsela said.

Meanwhile, Israeli settlers living illegally in the same territory, were subject to an entirely different legal regime and were tried in Israeli civilian courts with full access to due process.

Speaking at the ICJ yesterday on behalf of Algeria, Ahmed Laraba said Israel’s goal was to reach “a point of no return” in order to discard all possibility of the creation of a Palestinian state.

Laraba (pictured below) noted the “spectacular increase” in the number of Israeli settlements in the West Bank between 2012 and 2022. The numbers went from 520,000 settlers to 700,000, he said, which was “quite a dizzying figure”.

Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Ziad bin Maashi Al-Atiyah, asked the ICJ “to expressly declare that Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is illegal”.

Al-Atiyah said he believed that he spoke in consonance with virtually the entire international community in expressing Saudi Arabia’s “profound revulsion and condemnation of the horrendous death, destruction, and displacements of Palestinian civilians brought about by Israel’s illegal and brutal war in Gaza” and the “notorious increase in Israeli aggression, impunity, and international law violations” in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, since October 2023.

Israel was acting with “obscene brutality”, Al-Atiyah (pictured below) said. Saudi Arabia rejected Israel’s argument that this was the necessary price for defeating Hamas and saw it as “twisted logic”, he told the court.

Al-Atiyah said that Israel’s actions – laying waste to the Gaza Strip, killing and maiming tens of thousands of innocent civilians and depriving them of food, water and the basic means of survival, while displacing virtually all the 2.3 million people in Gaza – were not justified under any circumstances.

“Israel’s actions have severely dehumanised the Palestinian population, treating them as dispensable objects rather than human beings,” he told the court.

Al-Atiyah said that there was unanimous recognition in the international community of the illegality of Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

Israel, in its five-page written submission did not – no doubt because it could not – say anything whatsoever about the substantive allegations made against it, he said.

“Instead, it focuses almost entirely on why the request of the advisory opinion and the questions contained therein are somehow improper,” he told the court.

“The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from all of this is that Israel’s policies and practices in the occupied Palestinian territory are legally indefensible.”

Al-Atiyah added: “Given the recent increase in bloodshed and destruction by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, as well as the dangerous statements made at various levels of the Israeli government, we respectfully submit that the court is under a duty to issue its opinion.”

Bangladesh’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Riaz Hamidullah, told the ICJ judges: “A decisive determination by the court of the illegal status of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory and the legal consequences that arise from such status, including an immediate, unconditional and complete end to the occupation, would help secure the identity, respect, dignity and existence for the present and future generations of the Palestinian people in a state of their own at peace with Israel.”

Hamidullah (pictured below) said Israel’s actions in Gaza – the killing of thousands of innocent civilians, particular children, the destruction of homes, the occupation of ancestral lands, and the deliberate obstruction of the access to food and water – constituted “blatant violations of international law and serve as textbook examples of ethnic cleansing”.

He said Israel must cease “all acts preventing the exercise of the right to self-determination by the Palestinian people”.

Israel must withdraw occupation forces, dismantle illegal structures, such as settlements and the wall, repeal annexation-related legislation, and provide reparations for damages caused, Hamidullah said.

Representatives of the Netherlands, Belgium, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile also made oral submissions yesterday. Canada had also been due to make its submission yesterday, but has said it will not now present oral arguments..

In its written statement, Canada says there are “compelling reasons” for the ICJ to decline the UN General Assembly’s request for an advisory opinion.

“Notwithstanding the challenges involved, Canada believes direct dialogue between the parties themselves is the best path to create the conditions for peace. Canada is concerned that the issuance of an advisory opinion on Israeli practices in the occupied territories may contribute to a polarization of positions that risks moving the parties further away from a just and lasting resolution to the conflict. While not legally binding, an advisory opinion could impact the outcome of the negotiation framework established by the UN Security Council,” Canada wrote.

“In light of the fact that the questions posed pertain to the resolution of a bilateral dispute, where an interested State has not accepted the jurisdiction of the Court, and given that the UN Security Council has established a framework for the parties to resolve the dispute through negotiations. Canada is of the view that there are compelling reasons for the Court to exercise its discretion to decline the request of the UN General Assembly for an advisory opinion with respect to the questions posed in its resolution A/RES/77 /247 dated December 30, 2022.”

Canada said in its written statement that it remained fully committed to the goal of a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East, “including the creation of a Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel”. It said it continued to support the two-state solution “as the only viable path towards this goal”.

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