The Hague: The top United Nations court on Friday will rule on a plea by South Africa to order a halt to the Israeli military offensive in Gaza, with Pretoria accusing Israel of “genocide.”
Pretoria has urged the International Court of Justice to order an “immediate” stop to Israel’s campaign, including in the southern area of Rafah, and facilitate access of humanitarian aid.
Israel wants the court to toss out the request, arguing an enforced ceasefire would allow Hamas fighters to regroup and make it impossible to recover hostages taken in their October 7 assault.
In a highly-charged ruling in January, the court ordered Israel to do everything in its power to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza but stopped short of ordering a ceasefire.
South Africa argues that the recent Israeli operation in Rafah changed the situation on the ground and should compel the court to issue fresh emergency orders.
The ICJ rules in disputes between countries. Its orders are legally binding but it has no means to enforce them directly. The court has, for example, ordered Russia to halt its invasion of Ukraine to no avail.
Judges could agree to South Africa’s request, reject it out of hand or even issue a completely separate set of orders.
The ICJ’s ruling comes hot on the heels of a landmark request by the International Criminal Court’s lead prosecutor to seek arrest warrants for top Israeli and Hamas leaders.
Prosecutor Karim Khan alleges that senior Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, plus top Hamas officials, are guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity related to the October 7 attack and the war in Gaza.
In public hearings at the ICJ last week, South Africa’s ambassador Vusimuzi Madonsela alleged that “Israel’s genocide has continued apace and has just reached a new and horrific stage.”
“Although the present application was triggered by the unfolding situation in Rafah, Israel’s genocidal onslaught across Gaza has intensified over the past few days, also warranting the attention of this Court,” he said.
South Africa charges the only way to enable humanitarian aid in to ease the crisis in Gaza is a full halt to Israel’s military operations.
It wants the court to issue emergency orders — “provisional measures” in court jargon — while it weighs the broader South African case that Israel is breaching the 1948 UN Genocide Convention.
Israel counters that South Africa’s case is an “obscene exploitation of the most sacred convention” and the picture Pretoria paints to the court is “completely divorced from the facts and circumstances.”
“It makes a mockery of the heinous charge of genocide,” said top Israel lawyer Gilam Noam at hearings.
“Calling something a genocide, again and again, does not make it genocide. Repeating a lie does not make it true,” he added.
Noam described Rafah as a “focal point for ongoing terrorist activity” and said that operations there were “limited and localized,” with no harm meant to civilians.
Israel pressed ahead with the assault on Rafah, the last city in Gaza to be entered by its ground troops, in defiance of global opposition, including from top ally the United States.
Washington voiced concerns that about 1.4 million Palestinians trapped in the city would be caught in the line of fire.
Israel has since ordered mass evacuations from the city, and the UN says more than 800,000 people have fled.
The bloodiest ever Gaza war broke out after Hamas’s unprecedented attack on October 7, which resulted in the deaths of more than 1,170 people, mostly civilians, according to an AFP tally of Israeli official figures.
Militants also took 252 hostages, 124 of whom remain in Gaza, including 37 the army says are dead.
Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed at least 35,800 people in Gaza, mostly women and children, according to the Hamas-run territory’s health ministry.
Israel has also imposed a siege that has deprived Gaza’s 2.4 million people of most clean water, food, medicines and fuel.

WASHINGTON: A six-day-old US pier project in Gaza is starting to get more aid to Palestinians in need but conditions are challenging, US officials said Thursday. That reflects the larger problems bringing food and other supplies to starving people in the besieged territory.

The floating pier had a troubled launch, with crowds overrunning some of the first trucks coming from the new US-led sea route and taking its contents over the weekend. One man in the crowd was shot dead in still-unexplained circumstances. It led to a two-day suspension of aid distribution.
The US military worked with the UN and Israeli officials to select safer alternate routes for trucks coming from the pier, US Vice Admiral Brad Cooper told reporters Thursday.
As a result, the US pier on Wednesday accounted for 27 of the 70 total trucks of aid that the UN was able to round up from all land and sea crossings into Gaza for distribution to civilians, the United States said.
That’s a fraction of the 150 truckloads of food, emergency nutrition treatment and other supplies that US officials aim to bring in when the sea route is working at maximum capacity.
Plus, Gaza needs 600 trucks entering each day, according to the US Agency for International Development, to curb a famine that the heads of USAID and the UN World Food Program have said has begun in the north and to keep it from spreading south.

Only one of the 54 trucks that came from the pier Tuesday and Wednesday encountered any security issues on their way to aid warehouses and distribution points, US officials said. They called the issues “minor” but gave no details.
A deepening Israeli offensive in the southern city of Rafah has made it impossible for aid shipments to get through the crossing there, which is a key source for fuel and food coming into Gaza. Israel says it is bringing aid in through another border crossing, Kerem Shalom, but humanitarian organizations say Israeli military operations make it difficult for them to retrieve the aid there for distribution.
The Biden administration last week launched the $320 million floating pier for a new maritime aid route into Gaza as the seven-month-old Israel-Hamas war and Israeli restrictions on land crossings have severely limited food deliveries to 2.3 million Palestinians.
For all humanitarian efforts, “the risks are manifold,” Daniel Dieckhaus, USAID’s response director for Gaza, said at a briefing with Cooper. “This is an active conflict with deteriorating conditions.”
Dieckhaus rejected charges from some aid groups that the pier is diverting attention from what the US, UN and relief workers say is the essential need for Israel to allow full access to land crossings for humanitarian shipments.
For instance, Jeremy Konyndyk, a former USAID official now leading Refugees International, tweeted that “the pier is humanitarian theater.”
“I would not call, within a couple of days, getting enough food and other supplies for tens of thousands of people for a month theater,” Dieckhaus said Thursday when asked about the criticism.
At maximum capacity, the pier would bring in enough food for 500,000 of Gaza’s people. US officials stressed the need for flow through open land crossings for the remaining 1.8 million.