By Lehlohonolo Lehana.
Minister of International Relations and Cooperation says all states have an obligation to stop funding and facilitating Israel’s military actions in Gaza after the International Court of Justice (ICJ) made clear that those actions could be genocidal.
The ICJ ruled last Friday that Israel should do all it can to prevent genocide, including to stop harming and killing Palestinians.
“The finding [by the International Court of Justice (ICJ)] we think makes it clear that it is plausible that genocide is taking place against the Palestinian people in Gaza,” Pandor told reporters.
“This necessarily imposes an obligation on all states to cease funding and facilitating Israel’s military actions.”
Pandor said the real question facing nations today was, what happens if Israel does not comply with the ICJ order on Gaza after it ruled that the possibility of Israel actions constitute plausible genocide.
She said it remains vital for member states of the ICJ to respect and implement the decisions of the court.
“I suppose what confronts us now, is what do we do if there is no implementation. That is the question all nations must answer today, because it is a body of the United Nations that has set out these provisional measures, it’s not the South African government or South Africa on its own, it is the International Court of Justice.
“If its orders are not respected, what does this mean for every other government that commits atrocities against a people? This is the big question that confronts us as a global community today,” Pandor said.
Pandor said South Africa would “look at proposing other measures to the global community” in a bid to stop Israel killing civilians during its war in Gaza against Hamas militants, but didn’t go into details.
She has said the country hopes that Friday’s ruling, and whether Israel is abiding by it, will be discussed on a wider level at the United Nations.
Since the ruling, Israel has continued its military offensive, which it says is aimed at Hamas, and hundreds more Palestinians have been killed, according to figures from the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. The ministry said Wednesday that 150 people were killed, in the territory in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of Palestinian deaths in the war to more than 26,700.
Pandor said there was a danger of the world doing nothing to stop the civilian casualties in Gaza and said similar inaction contributed to the horrific death toll in the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, when more than 800,000 people were slaughtered in the East African country.
She said South Africa was eager to pursue the case it has lodged with the separate International Criminal Court, an indication the country will continue its legal pressure on Israel. In the ICC case, South Africa accuses Benjamin Netanyahu of war crimes and asks the court to order his arrest.
The ICJ and ICC are both based in The Hague but deal with different cases. The ICJ is a U.N. court that decides disputes between countries. The ICC prosecutes individuals.
A South African delegation met with the ICC court president and prosecutor while in The Hague last week for the ICJ ruling, Pandor said, and stressed “our concern at the slow pace of action on matters that we referred to them as urgent matters.”
South Africa filed its case against Netanyahu at the ICC in November. The ICC is the same court that issued an arrest warrant for Russian president Vladimir Putin last year over alleged war crimes relating to the removal of children from Ukraine.
Pandor also said the government has not received any funding from Iran in its pursuit of genocide charges against Israel over the Gaza conflict.
The minister said on Wednesday such claims were part of a fightback campaign against SA for having brought the charges to the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The allegation is essentially: The ANC, which for years has been teetering on the verge of bankruptcy, announced in early January that it had managed to stabilise its finances. It didn’t really give any specifics on how this had been accomplished.
In the same week, South Africa approached the ICJ in the Hague to ask that Israel’s actions in Gaza be classified as genocide.
To some people, the timing of these two events is suspicious. And so the rumour was born that Iran, an enemy of Israel, had essentially paid the ANC to litigate against Israel in the ICJ.
South Africa has for decades been an advocate for the Palestinian cause, comparing the plight of Palestinians to that of Black South Africans under apartheid. Israel has denied allegations of genocide and rejects the comparison to the apartheid era.
Meanwhile President Cyril Ramaphosa, said on Wednesday that the Israeli regime has been spreading fake news and lies about the African country to fight back against the ICJ case.
His spokersperson Vincent Magwenya said, however, that the move would not deter South Africa from working for freedom of Palestine.
“We are expecting more, but none of it will deter South Africa from the pursuit of seeing a free Palestine, free from occupation and genocidal attacks, “said Magwenya in a post on the X.”