Press Release

January 2024, The Hague

HPP Statement: Genocide Convention against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

We, The Hague Peace Projects, would like to express our support of the proceedings instigated by South Africa at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) against Israel, and we laud the steps taken by Spain, Ireland, Belgium, and Norway, in condemning without ambiguity the disproportionate answer of the Israeli government to the attacks of October 7th. The Israeli government has been denying the Palestinian population of Gaza access to food, water, medicine, and fuel in a concerted effort to maximize their suffering and expedite the demise of this ethnic group. Israeli occupying forces have killed more than twenty thousand Palestinian civilians in just a matter of months since October 7, 2023, not accounting for the injured and yet unnamed corpses lying under the rubble.

Schools, hospitals, shelters, and ambulances have been purposefully targeted, as well as fleeing civilians, with the intention of terrorizing the population of Gaza and producing a new Nakba that would displace the Gaza population into refugee camps in Egypt rather than to open the northern border into Israel and create refugee camps there as part of an operation meant to protect civilians. These actions by the Israeli government defy all sense of humanity, proportionality, and any conceivable right to self-defence from occupied populations. Official statements made by the Israeli government and across the breadth of the political spectrum amount to a blatant campaign to destroy the Palestinian presence in Gaza and ethnically cleanse the occupied Palestinian territories by encouraging attacks in the West Bank, increasingly so in the months that preceded the October 7th attacks and since then.

It is imperative that the genocidal acts of Israel are recognised as such by the International Court of Justice so that their prevention can be encouraged by international pressure and enforcement. This is a critical precedent for the prevention of future genocides and the credibility of the international architecture of law, democracy, and human rights. The experience of a legalized apartheid in South Africa is in all our memories and this country’s desire to respect the lessons therein and uphold international law, in the case of the apartheid system imposed on the Palestinians as established by the UN itself in 2022 and that of the ongoing war on Palestine, should be supported and lauded by any means.

We therefore urge national governments to immediately file a declaration of intervention in support of the South African case against Israel at the International Court of Justice to stop the killing in the occupied Palestinian territories and convey an international peace conference aimed at resolving the conflict once and for all by addressing the question of the right of return of the refugees and the financial compensations that will have to be paid.

Peace through Dialogue