Zane Dangor cited a warning by major aid groups and NGOs in Gaza that a 50-day blockade on aid is pushing the enclave into famine to complete collapse. (Lefty Shivambu/Gallo Images)
Israel is deliberately depriving the people of Gaza of humanitarian aid and condemning an entire civilian population to starvation, South Africa’s director general for international relations argued before the International Court of Justice on Tuesday.
Zane Dangor cited a warning by major aid groups and NGOs in Gaza that a 50-day blockade on aid is pushing the enclave into famine to complete collapse.
“This collapse is by design,” he said, before quoting Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz saying on 16 April that the government was not prepared to allow aid into Gaza.
“Under the world’s watchful eye, Palestinians across the Palestinian territory are being subjected to atrocity crimes, persecution, apartheid and genocide,” Dangor said.
“While we watch the gaze of Palestinians is directly squarely at the international community and this court whose advice is urgently being sought for the protection of the most fundamental rights including the right to life.”
South Africa was the first of about 40 countries to address the court in hearings for an advisory opinion on Israel’s legal obligation to allow aid to Palestinians and to cooperate with the United Nations’ Palestinian aid agency UNRWA.
Dangor described the UNRWA as “but one of Israel’s latest casualties” in attacks inflicted on any person or establishment that attempts to call it to account.
“Israel continues to act with impunity as it does enjoy some form of exceptionalism from accountability to international law and norm,” he said.
“Conversely, any person or entity which seeks to hold Israel to account for its inhumane and unlawful actions, is subjected to counter-measures and censure, from which the United Nations and this court have not been spared.”
The UNRWA was being attacked in furtherance of Israel’s goal to deny Palestinians the right to return to homes from which they were driven during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Dangor said.
“The attacks on UNRWA are also, deliberately, imperilling the existence of Palestinians as a group,” he added, reiterating South Africa’s contention in a petition brought before the court in 2023 that Israel is in breach of the UN Genocide Convention.
“The international community cannot accept a reality in which an entire civilian population is deliberately starved by Israel.”
A ruling in the genocide case remains pending, but the court has issued interim orders, called provisional measures, instructing Israel to temper its actions. This included instructions in January and March last year to allow aid into Gaza and another in May to cease its military offensive in Rafah in southern Gaza, a refuge for displaced Palestinians.
Recent reports have suggested it is planning to incorporate the city into a security corridor that would sever Gaza from Egypt and turn the territory of two million people into an enclave completely surrounded by Israel.
President Cyril Ramaphosa’s adviser on legal and international affairs, Nokukhanya Jele, on Tuesday told the International Court of Justice that Israel has “blatantly ignored” its binding obligations under the interim orders, by redoubling its denial of aid to Palestinians.
The present hearings have called to assist the judges in answering a question by the UN General Assembly as to whether Israel acted unlawfully and in breach of the immunities extended to a UN entity.
The question flowed from a resolution tabled by Norway in December and adopted by 137 to 12 votes. It specifically concerns two bills adopted by the Knesset — Israel’s parliament — in October.
The legislation banned the UNRWA from operating in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem, declared that it harboured terrorists and ordered the government to end all cooperation with the organisation, including giving visas to its staff.
Israel has not sent a delegation to the hearings, which began on Monday when the UN’s legal counsel, Elinor Hammarskjöld, told the court it was a cold fact that no humanitarian aid has entered Gaza since March.
She noted that as an occupying power, Israel was legally obliged to allow all relevant UN entities to carry out their work for the benefit of the local population.
The laws adopted by the Knesset therefore were therefore inconsistent with the country’s obligations under international law.
The Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, told the tribunal that Israel was ensuring that the people of Gaza remain trapped “between death and displacement”.
Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh, the counsel for the Palestinian state, described Israel’s actions as an attempt to destroy a UN subsidiary and an attack on the international order itself.
Israel’s foreign minister, Gideon Saar, in a statement coinciding with the start of the hearings, denied that Israel was violating its obligations under international law and is in breach of its obligations under international law.
Israel has countered that it was obliged to end all cooperation with the UNRWA because Hamas had infiltrated the relief agency. Aid began to flow into Gaza during a two-month truce that began in January but the blockade was imposed when Israel resumed its onslaught on Hamas in an attempt to force it to release dozens of remaining hostages.
It is the longest aid blockade yet in a war triggered by Hamas’s lethal attacks on southern Israel in October 2023.
Saar described the court process as part of the “systematic persecution” of Israel.
In July last year, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion in which it found Israel’s assertion of sovereignty over occupied Palestinian territories a contravention of the prohibition of claiming territory by force.
Hammarskjöld said the adoption of the two laws in October 204 appears to constitute an extension of sovereignty over the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem.
“They are, as such, inconsistent with Israel’s obligations under international law.”
Dangor said the court had in July 2024 held that it had the jurisdiction to issue an advisory opinion. The same reasoning should apply in this instance.
The court had adequate facts to allow it to deliver an opinion, he added, despite an information blackout imposed by Israel, which extended to denying international media entry to Gaza and killing journalists.
“Accepting Israel’s argument, under the circumstances, that this court has insufficient facts before it, would be rewarding it for its own egregious conduct.”
Addressing the court in French, Jele, said the dissolution of any of Palestine’s quasi-state institutions, including those administered by the UNRWA since 1949, was an act clearly intended to destroy the viability of Palestinian statehood.