South Africa has recognized the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people through Israel’s colonization since 1948, which has systematically and forcibly dispossessed, displaced and fragmented the Palestinian people, deliberately denying them the internationally recognized inalienable right to self determination and their internationally recognized rights of return as refugees to their towns and villages in what is now the state of Israel.
We are also particularly mindful of Israel’s institutionalized regime of discriminatory laws, policies, and practices designed and maintained to establish domination, subjecting the Palestinian people to apartheid on both sides of the Green Line.
Decades-long impunity for widespread and systematic human rights violations has emboldened Israel in its recurrence and intensification of international crimes in Palestine.
At the outset, South Africa acknowledges that the genocidal acts and omissions by the state of Israel inevitably form part of a continuum of illegal acts perpetrated against the Palestinian people since 1948.
The application places Israel’s genocidal acts and omissions within the broader context of Israel’s 25-year apartheid, 56-year occupation, and 16-year siege imposed on the Gaza Strip.
4. “This killing is nothing short of destruction of Palestinian life. It is inflicted deliberately. No one is spared. Not even newborn babies.”
Adila Hassim, another lawyer presenting South Africa’s case, described Israel’s “unparalleled and unprecedented killing.”
In schools, in hospitals, in mosques, in churches, and as they tried to find food and water for their families. They have been killed if they failed to evacuate, killed in the places to which they have fled, and even killed while they attempted to flee along Israeli declared safe routes.
The level of killing is so extensive that those whose bodies are found are buried in mass graves, often unidentified.
In the first three weeks alone, following 7 October, Israel deployed 6,000 bombs per week. At least 200 times it has deployed 2000 pound bombs in southern areas of Palestine designated as safe. These bombs have also decimated the north, including refugee camps. Two thousand pound bombs are some of the biggest and most destructive bombs available. They are dropped by lethal fighter jets that are used to strike targets on the ground by one of the world’s most resourced armies.
Israel has killed an unparalleled and unprecedented number of civilians. With the full knowledge of how many civilian lives each bomb will take.
More than 1,800 Palestinian families in Gaza have lost multiple family members and hundreds of multigenerational families have been wiped out with no remaining survivors. Mothers, fathers, children, siblings, grandparents, aunts, cousins, often all killed together.
This killing is nothing short of destruction of Palestinian life. It is inflicted deliberately. No one is spared. Not even newborn babies.
5. “Genocides are never declared in advance, but this court has the benefit of the past 13 weeks of evidence that shows incontrovertibly a pattern of conduct and related intention that justifies a plausible claim of genocidal acts.”