On 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 by the court 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.
About that, the facts are that on April 25 Judge Joan Donoghue, who presided over the hearing in the ICJ of the accusation of genocide brought by South Africa against Israel, said in a BBC television interview that the court “did not decide – and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media – it did not decide that the claim of genocide was plausible….The shorthand that often appears, that there is a plausible case of genocide, is not what the court decided.”
She explained that what the court did decide was that the Palestinians had a plausible case to be protected from genocide. That is doubtless why the court ordered Israel to take special care to avoid infringing those rights. Now it has gone one step further because, in the........