There is some confusion over what, exactly, the recent decisions of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court mean for Israel. Neville Teller clarifies the situation here: “The ICJ’s ruling on Rafah helps Hamas carry out more terror – opinion,” by Neville Teller, Jerusalem Post, May
Last Friday afternoon [May 24], the International Court of Justice (ICJ) responded to the request by South Africa, made on May 10, that the court order an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. It did not do that.
By a majority of 13 to 2 the bench of international judges ordered Israel to halt its military assault on the city of Rafah. The court’s president, Judge Nawaf Salam, said that the provisional measures ordered in March did not fully address the situation in Gaza now, and conditions had been met for a new emergency order.
As in its previous ruling, the court has not ordered a ceasefire, nor required Israel to stop its assault on Hamas. Nor has it changed its position on the assertion, constantly repeated in the media and elsewhere, that it has concluded there is a “plausible” case that Israel has been committing genocide in Gaza….
All that the ICJ required of the IDF was that it halt its operation only in one place — Rafah. It did not call for a ceasefire, nor demand that the IDF cease operations elsewhere in Gaza. And it did not conclude, though the mainstream media keeps wrongly insisting that it did, that Israel has been committing “genocide” in Gaza.
The court has not taken into account, either, that on May 8, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) issued revised and verified figures of women and children killed in Gaza.
Creeping up daily to stand on May 7 at approximately 9,500 women and 14,500 children killed since the beginning of the conflict, on May 8 the figures had been slashed by more than 50%.
With no fanfare, the OCHA announced that the verified number of women killed was now 4,959, and the figure for children was 7,797. In short, the verifiable death toll has been reduced by more than 50% for both. The data now differentiates between the total number of deaths as reported by Hamas (over 34,000) and the number of “identified” fatalities (some 24,000.)
Even the revised figures are open to question. Hamas counts everyone aged 18 and under as “children.” There are many full-time combatants aged 17 or 18, and they are almost certainly inflating the [numbers of] child fatalities. Moreover, the fatality figures, which include all deaths in hospital, include the elderly, an unknown number of whom will have died from natural causes.
Hamas inflates the figures on children killed by counting, as children, combatants as old as 17 and 18. It also inflates its total figures by counting as “killed by the IDF” those who died natural deaths. These natural deaths are believed to amount to 800 Gazans a month; that is, over the past seven months of war, 5600 people have died those “natural deaths.” That figure needs to be subtracted from the current claim, already greatly reduced by the UN’s OCHA to 24,000 (from 36,000) to 18,400.
In addition, the figures [from Hamas] include an element categorized as “unregistered” deaths. These figures do not refer to identified bodies held by hospitals but to unverifiable reports of deaths attributed by Hamas to “reliable media sources.”…
In other words, for this category of deaths there are no bodies, only figures supplied by Hamas that assures us they come from “reliable media sources.” Hamas can make up whatever figures it wants in this category.
It [the humanitarian case against Israel] won’t [collapse], of course. It was the Hamas-inspired term “collective punishment” that the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, used in his application on May 20 to issue international arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant. Khan stated as fact that Israel, as part of a systematic plan, indulged in “collective punishment of the civilian population.”
This plan, he wrote, involved “deliberately” starving the Gaza population; “willfully” causing them great suffering or serious injury; willfully killing and “intentionally” directing attacks against them; murdering and persecuting them – all of which amounted to war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Note the words “deliberately,” “willfully,” and “intentionally.” The idea of some secret Israeli plan to attack the people of Gaza sails perilously close to historic antisemitic tropes and is nothing more than a personal biased opinion which, like the charge of genocide, is unprovable because it is untrue. It is to be hoped that the ICC judges charged with examining Khan’s arrest warrant application perceive his anti-Israel charges for what they are.
The IDF does not “deliberately” or “intentionally” kill innocent civilians, as Karim Khan would have the ICJ judges believe. Civilians are unavoidably killed, as they are in every war, especially in densely-populated urban areas like Gaza, and even more so in this Gaza conflict, where Hamas deliberately embeds its combatants and weapons within civilian buildings such as schools, mosques, apartment buildings, and hospitals. But the IDF makes great efforts to minimize civilian casualties, mainly by an elaborate system of warnings. To date, the IDF has sent 15 million text messages, made 16 million prerecorded phone calls, as well as 100,000 personal calls, and dropped nine million leaflets, all to warn civilians away from areas that are about to be targeted. Karim Khan takes no notice of any of that; in his version of the war, the IDF is “willfully” and “intentionally” killing civilians instead of doing everything it can, as we know it always does, to avoid killing them.
Jay Lykins says
Where do I go to offer my criticism of the ICC. What a joke they have proven to be. They act like they are in collusion with the NYC judge who denied our former president of his Constitutional First Amendment Right’s.
tgusa says
Here we go again with the internationals.
From the web,
“Liberal internationalism was born in the nineteenth century and by the century’s end it had begun to crystallize into a recognizable school of thought A distinctive cluster of ideas and agendas for organizing international relations.”
All in all I think internationalism has worked out great for the world over two centuries. Such peaceful times, dont you think? /S
They even have an anthem. The Internationale.
https://youtu.be/PTKgW4xej5s?si=FDxntHEjt3v6liAO
Yeah, I think as an American I will pass on that.
tgusa says
Here is a better version. Forward! Power to the people!
https://youtu.be/3sh4kz_zhyo?si=WDOe2abocyQplrkJ
Yeah sure.
Westman says
Israel has been forced by reality to clean out Hamas while these “dandies” of a self-styled court of the un-threatened all seem to have the same tailor and perhaps the same sponsor. It’s a very visually impressive representation of government-teat lunchers who couldn’t change a car tire. Mark Twain was right, clothes make the phoney man.
And as for their far-reaching superior thought – they should find themselves a spider hole in which to hide, for with Dementia Joe’s signoff on direct attacks on Russia, by NATO technicians operating in Ukraine, WW3 has been released in SloMo. The elimination of Hamas will be a fading sidebar.
So glad we’ve almost made it,
So sad they had to fade it,
Everybody wants to rule the world.