That did not stop an Israeli MP from Mr Netanyahu’s party from saying it was better to “burn” Gaza than let Israeli troops there be harmed.
“It is better to burn down buildings rather than have soldiers harmed,” Nissim Vaturi told Israel’s Hakol Baramah radio on Wednesday. “There are no innocents there.”
Eylon Levy, an Israeli government spokesman, on Wednesday dismissed the case as “blood libel” seeking to cover up the crimes of “the Hamas rapist regime”.
He defended Israel’s war in Gaza as the only way to protect the country against Hamas, a terror group that has vowed to destroy the country.
The politically-charged case has already prompted Israel to abandon a decades-old policy of boycotting the UN court and its 15 elected judges.
With Israel’s military operation in Gaza now in its fourth month, Israeli lawyers are concerned that statements made by several officials during the war may pose a problem in the case.
‘Incitement to genocide’
A leading professor of international law put up to talk to journalists about the case by the Israeli embassy in London said he thought that statements made by Israeli officials and politicians may amount to “incitement to genocide”.
Prof Yuval Shany, chair of International Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a former chair of the UN Human Rights Committee, said that while genocide was hard to prove as a crime, the most difficult element for Israel’s legal team to deal with were staments from the country’s own politicians and officials.
“I think it is fair to say that some of these statements could be read as incitement to genocide,” he told journalists.
Incitement to genocide is a crime in itself but separate from that of genocide. Prof Shany said that, to prove a case of genocide, lawyers would have to reveal a deliberate intent on the part of the Israeli government to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians of Gaza.
He added, however, that for the judges in the Hague to allow the case to be heard in full, they would only need to be convinced that it was “plausable” that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
Attorney Michael Sfard, who represents a number of clients accusing the judiciary of inaction, said the remarks were only helping South Africa to build the genocide case against Israel.
“With genocide, you need to prove a special intention – what South Africa has been doing is citing those statements and the fact that those statements have not received any pushback from the legal establishment,” Mr Sfard told The Telegraph. “By doing that, South Africa counters Israeli claims that those remarks don’t represent a government policy.”
Hard-Right coalition
The appointment of Mr Barak as Israel’s representative on the ICJ panel came as a surprise to the hard-Right coalition partners of Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister.
Mr Barak was fiercely critical of the prime minister’s controversial plans to reform the judiciary, prompting supporters of Mr Netanyahu to label the 87-year-old veteran judge an “enemy of the nation” and besiege his house for days.
Mr Barak handled the legal side of Israel’s landmark 1979 peace deal with Egypt – its first with an Arab country. But he also gave the green light to numerous security moves that further entrenched the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
South Africa, whose governing African National Congress party has long championed the Palestinian cause, has assembled a heavyweight legal team to argue its case at the ICJ led by 87-year-old John Dugard, who in the final decades of the White-rule era was regarded as perhaps the country’s top anti-apartheid lawyer.
“John Dugard was one of a tiny handful of legal academics who were critical [in the legal fight against apartheid],” Gilbert Marcus, a veteran advocate from the period, told The Telegraph.
Emily Foster is a globe-trotting journalist based in the UK. Her articles offer readers a global perspective on international events, exploring complex geopolitical issues and providing a nuanced view of the world’s most pressing challenges.
