Ten more countries make submissions at the World Court’s hearings on Israel’s occupation of Palestine

By Annette Gartland on February 22, 2024

Ten more countries have made submissions on the third of six days of hearings about Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

The hearings at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague 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”.

Representatives of Colombia, Cuba, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States spoke at the first session yesterday (Wednesday), followed by representatives of Russia, France, The Gambia, Guyana, and Hungary, who made their submissions in the afternoon session.

Most of yesterday’s submissions echoed earlier calls for an immediate end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine. The majority of the representatives who have made submissions so far have denounced Israel’s occupation as illegal and called on the ICJ to make a clear statement to this effect.

There have been appeals for the dismantling of Israel’s “illegal settlements” and an end to the apartheid suffered by the Palestinians.

Palestinian representatives said on the first day of the hearings on Monday (February 19) 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.

Yesterday, however, Attila Hidegh, representing Hungary, asked the ICJ “to decline providing an advisory opinion”.

Hidegh. who is Hungary’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, said that the proceedings brought before the court “may directly contribute to the escalation of the conflict”.

In his submission yesterday, acting legal advisor at the US State Department Richard Visek focused heavily on the “established framework” within which the US says the ICJ should address the legal questions before it.

Visek (pictured below) said the ICJ’s challenge was how to provide advice “in a way that promotes the framework rather than disrupting its balance, potentially making the possibility of negotiations even more difficult”.

Visek told the court: “It would not, as some participants suggest, be conducive to achievement of the established framework to issue an opinion that calls for a unilateral, immediate, and unconditional withdrawal by Israel that does not account for Israel’s legitimate security needs.”

Under the established framework, he argued, “any movement towards Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza requires consideration of Israel’s very real security needs”.

He added: “We were all reminded of those security needs on October 7, and they persist. Regrettably, those needs have been ignored by many of the participants in asserting how the court should consider the questions before it.”

The United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United Nations, Lana Nusseibeh, said in her submission yesterday that Israel’s occupation of Palestine was illegal and violations in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip imperilled the two-state solution.

She said “an increasingly brutal Israeli regime of systemic subjugation in the West Bank” compounded Palestinian suffering.

The horrors that had unfolded over the last few months – the 7th October attack on Israel, the destruction of the Gaza Strip, and the oppression in the West Bank – underscored “the desperate need” for realising the two-state solution, Nusseibeh said.

Nusseibeh (pictured below) said that, in the context of this “grim reality”, the ICJ’s advisory opinion was appropriate, urgent, and necessary.

Egypt’s representative, Jasmine Moussa, told the ICJ judges that Israel’s actions led to the conclusion that its occupation of Palestine was “an illegal annexation, conquest, and de facto colonial endeavour”.

The ICJ hearings were occurring against the backdrop of “a 35-year history of displacement, dispossession, collective punishment, and daily indiscriminate and systematic violence, and human suffering of untold proportions”, Moussa, said.

Moussa (pictured below) said there was “overwhelming evidence” that Israeli support for and maintenance of settlements was intended to permanently alter the demographic composition of the Occupied Palestinian Territory and extend Israeli sovereignty over it.

Israel was “deliberately and wantonly” creating conditions intended to make life in Gaza impossible, “imposing siege and starvation, including by impeding humanitarian access and the distribution of relief through constant obstruction and bombardment”, she said.

Cuba’s representative, Anayansi Rodriguez Camejo, said that Israel was committing an “act of low-intensity genocide” that was being perpetrated with “systematic and effective cruelty”.

She said that to qualify Israel’s actions merely as acts of apartheid would leave out “the implicit intention to exterminate the Palestinian people either in part or as an ethnic or religious group to whom the right to self-determination is denied”.

Rodriguez Camejo (pictured below) said that Israel had ignored numerous resolutions and decisions adopted by the UN General Assembly, the UN Security Council, and the International Court of Justice and described Israel’s attitude as indolent.

She said that those making submissions and the judges had a “high moral, historical, and legal responsibility” to pronounce themselves in a clear, transparent, and forceful manner “on the ignominious situation of the Palestinian people and to demand international responsibility for what is happening in the occupied territories”.

Rodriguez Camejo said the ICJ should take a stand “in the clearest, strongest, and most forceful legal terms in support of international law”.

She said there should be a clear and unanimous ruling by the court that impartially and independently established the legal implications resulting from depriving the Palestinians of their fundamental rights, including the right to life, freedom, and self-determination.

“It is up to the International Court of Justice to render the peace and justice that the Palestinian people deserve without political double standards,” Rodriguez Camejo said.

“That is the reason why the delegation of the Republic of Cuba respectfully requests the prompt issuance of an advisory opinion against the many years of genocidal impunity, clearly stating the international implications and responsibilities of those who, one way or the other, contribute to the extermination of the Palestinian people.”

Guyana’s representative, Edward Craven, said Israel’s occupation of Palestine was unlawful. “The occupation must therefore end immediately, comprehensively, irreversibly,” he said.

Craven said that, for many, many years, Israel had chosen to place its own expansionist interests above the duty to respect international law.

“The result of that deliberate defiance of international law has been decades of dispossession, oppression, and injustice for the State of Palestine and the Palestinian people, who have been systematically deprived of their fundamental right of self-determination,” he said.

“Israel’s activities in the occupied territory, which have been brought into sharp focus by the tragic and ongoing humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza, are a matter of truly global concern with significant implications not only for the State of Palestine and the Palestinian people but for all states opposed to the acquisition of territory by force.”

Craven added: “Israel’s continued occupation of Palestinian territory is an offence against this bedrock principle of international law and it is a serious and a continuing threat to a peaceful, secure, and stable world.”

The highest officials in successive Israeli governments had openly and brazenly declared an intention to exercise sovereignty over the entire West Bank, which they had renamed Judea and Samaria and defined as “an integral and inseparable part of the land of Israel”, Craven said.

Permanent occupation was not occupation at all, Craven told the court. “It is military conquest. It is annexation and annexation is, of course, strictly forbidden under international law. It therefore necessarily follows that an occupation which is intended to be permanent is unlawful under international law.”

Craven told the court that Israel had annexed most of the occupied territory, including by implanting almost three-quarters of a million Israeli settlers in hundreds of settlements, which Israel’s leaders had promised never to remove.

“In Jerusalem, Israel has formally declared sovereignty over the occupied territory and has expressly extended the application of its domestic laws to that territory,” he said.

“This is a classic, quintessential example of de jure annexation and it is irrefutable evidence that Israel intends its occupation to be permanent. Over many years, Israel’s leaders have repeatedly proclaimed East Jerusalem to be an inseparable part of Israel.”

There had been a systematic implantation of more than 230,000 Israeli settlers in East Jerusalem. Craven said.

He described this as “an exercise in deliberate demographic manipulation that has profoundly changed the composition, the character, and the status of the Holy City”.

In the rest of the West Bank, Craven said, Israel had conducted a similar decades-long process of implanting half a million Israeli settlers in more than 270 illegal settlements.

“Those settlements and the network of settler-only roads and infrastructure which connect them form a vast, interconnected constellation of illegal colonies to which Israel has extended the application of its domestic laws,” Craven said.

“The intent and the effect is to establish permanent Israeli dominion throughout the West Bank.”

Craven said the ICJ should not be deterred from issuing an advisory opinion about Israel’s occupation of Palestine that answers in full the questions posed by the General Assembly. Advocates of abstention or timidity with regard to this were wrong, he said.

Arguments that the ICJ should not issue an advisory opinion rested on a fundamentally flawed premise, Craven said.

“They assume the existence of ongoing negotiations between Israel and the state of Palestine, which could be prejudiced by an advisory opinion, but such negotiations do not exist. There have been no negotiations between the two states for a decade. There are no live negotiations.”

Colombia’s representative, Andrea Jiménez Herrera, said the ICJ had itself already been confronted with “the veritable map of horror and devastation which the Gaza Strip has become as a result of the total war and scorched-earth policies unleashed by the government of Israel”.

Herrera (pictured below) said Colombia submitted that the ICJ should not underestimate the fact that the situation in Gaza had become more deadly over the past months “and therefore the legal consequences of such actions must be even more serious today than in the world we were living before this bloodshed started”.

Israel’s prolonged occupation and further annexation of the Palestinian territory was “a manifest violation of the rule of international customary law, which clearly prohibits the acquisition of territory by force”, Herrera said.

“It also blatantly ignores the UN Charter and the findings of this court and its advisory opinion on the wall case,” she added.

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.

The wall continues to cut through and divide Palestinian communities.

Russia’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Vladimir Tarabrin, said in his submission at the ICJ that Russia was convinced that the “tragic events” of October 7, 2023, could not justify “the collective punishment of more than two million Gazans”.

Russia could not accept the logic of officials in Israel and some Western countries who tried to defend the “indiscriminate violence against civilians” by referring to Israel’s duty to protect its nationals, Tarabrin said.

“Violence can only lead to more violence. Hatred brings hatred. This vicious circle must be broken,” he told the court.

Tarabrin said Israel was under an obligation “to cease its violations of international law” and to allow the Palestinian people to establish an independent state.

“In the present proceedings, the court will be right to conclude that Israel’s violations result in Israel’s duty to comply with the obligations it had breached, to put an end to its ongoing violations, and to provide reparation for the damage caused,” Tarabrin said.

“This means, first and foremost, that Israel is under an international legal obligation to respect the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to stop all settlement activities in the occupied territory.”

Tarabrin said Israel was also under an obligation to cease all activities that impeded reaching a final status agreement based on the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination “in an independent, viable, and contiguous Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital”.

He said images from Gaza were terrifying. Indiscriminate airstrikes were killing civilians and erasing whole residential districts, he said, and up to 90% of Gazans had been forced to leave their homes and were living in inhuman conditions.

Tarabrin said Israeli settlements in Palestine were “contrary to the principle of inadmissibility of acquisition of territory by force”, were “dangerously imperilling” the viability of a two-state solution, and violated the rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination.

The representative of The Gambia, attorney-general and minister of justice Dawda Jallow, said in his submission to the ICJ that there was no escaping the conclusion that Israel’s occupation was illegal “for violating the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination” and that it must expeditiously be brought to an end.

Even if the occupation of the Palestinian territories by Israel was lawful at one time, the fact that it had continued for more than five decades meant that it could not possibly still be lawful today, Jallow said.

Jallow said Israel’s prolonged occupation of Palestine was “wholly disproportionate to any legitimate aim”. Israel had “entrenched an apartheid regime” in the occupied territories and the Palestinian people continued to be deprived of their right to self-determination indefinitely, he said.

France’s representative Diego Colas began his submission to the ICJ with a reference to his country’s condemnation of Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. Israel had a right to defend itself, Colas said, but this right had to be exercised in full compliance with international law.

Colas said France repeated its unwavering support for a negotiated two-state solution, with Israel and the Palestinians “coexisting side by side within secure and recognised boundaries based on the lines of June 4, 1967”, with both states having Jerusalem as their capital.

“Indeed, for France, only a two-state solution will meet both the rights of Israelis for security and the legitimate aspirations of Palestinians for a viable, contiguous, and independent state”, Colas told the court.

In his submission on behalf of Hungary, Attila Hidegh also made early mention of the October 7 attack on Israel, stating: “These actions are not just an attack on a democratic country; they represent an assault on all democracies around the world. These actions are not just a clear violation of international law; they are also crimes against humanity.”