Israel’s main defence was that its actions were self-defence against Hamas’s attack on October 7.
Unsurprisingly, we heard a very long argument about how atrocious these attacks were, they showed pictures of the hostages and they also mentioned that South Africa didn’t mention anything about this on the first day of the hearing on Thursday and that was misleading, a word that was mentioned many times.
In terms of the intent, which is a very important issue to prove that Israel indeed has the intent to commit genocide against the people of Gaza, the argument by Israel was that it was clearly not government policy, according to them, although South Africa mentioned a number of statements [by Israeli officials].
Israel also pointed out that it is a rules-based country with a legal system, so everything that goes wrong in Gaza, if crimes are committed, those will be dealt with in the national courts.
And finally the issue of jurisdiction; for a dispute to be here at the ICJ, one of the requirements is that the state that takes a case to this court should try to sort out this problem first; according to Israel, they didn’t manage to talk to South Africa before they brought this case to the court although they tried.
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