A legal hearing into Israel's war on Gaza began in The Hague on Thursday as the International Court of Justice hears arguments accusing Israel of committing "genocide" in the Strip.

Because genocide cases, which are difficult to prove, can take years to resolve, South Africa asked the court to implement it as a first step and urgently put an immediate end to this massacre, which has so far claimed the lives of more than 23,000 people, most of them women and children. Stopping Israel's continued bombardment of Gaza, reducing it to rubble and scattering terrified survivors across the land, meets the Convention's definition of genocide to the letter.

South Africa's 84-page application to the ICJ includes ten pages (starting on page 59 of the memorandum) of statements by Israeli civilian and military officials documenting their genocidal intentions in Gaza. These statements include statements by Prime Minister Netanyahu, President Herzog, Defense Minister Gallant, five other ministers, senior military officers and members of Parliament. Reading these statements, it is difficult to see how a fair and impartial court could fail to recognize the genocidal intent behind the death and destruction being caused by Israeli forces and American weapons in Gaza.

The Israeli magazine +972 said that it spoke with seven current and former Israeli intelligence officials who participated in previous attacks on Gaza. They explained the systematic nature of Israel's targeting practices and how the scope of civilian infrastructure targeted by Israel has been significantly expanded in the current attack. In particular, it has expanded the scope of bombing civilian infrastructure, or what it euphemistically defines as “power center targets,” which have made up half of its targets since the beginning of this war.

Israeli "force targets" in Gaza include public buildings such as hospitals, schools, banks, government offices and high-rise residential complexes. The general pretext for destroying civilian infrastructure in Gaza is that civilians would blame Hamas for its destruction, and that this would undermine its civilian support base. This kind of brutal logic has been proven wrong in US-backed conflicts around the world. As for Gaza, the matter is nothing more than a hideous fantasy. The Palestinians are well aware of who is bombing them and who is supplying them with bombs.

Intelligence officials told +972 that Israel maintains extensive occupancy figures for every building in Gaza, and has accurate estimates of how many civilians will be killed in each building it bombs. While Israeli and American officials publicly disparage Palestinian casualty numbers, intelligence sources told +972 that the Palestinian death toll is remarkably consistent with Israel's own estimates of the number of civilians it is killing. “To make matters worse, Israel has begun using artificial intelligence to generate targets with minimal human scrutiny, and it is doing so faster than its forces can bomb them,” according to the magazine.

Israeli officials claim that each of the high-rise residential buildings Israel is bombing contains some sort of Hamas presence, but an intelligence official explained: “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza; there is no building that does not contain something of Hamas, so if you want to find a way to turn a high-rise building into a target, you will be able to do it.”

It is noteworthy that two days after South Africa submitted its request regarding the genocide practiced by Israel against the Palestinians in Gaza to the International Court of Justice, Israeli Finance Minister Smotrich announced on New Year’s Eve that Israel must largely evacuate the Gaza Strip of Palestinians and bring in Israeli settlers. “If we act in a strategically correct way and encourage immigration, if there are 100,000 or 200,000 Arabs in Gaza, not two million, then the whole rhetoric about the ‘day after’ will be completely different,” Smotrich said.

When reporters confronted US State Department spokesman Matt Miller (on January 2) about Smotrich's statement, and similar statements by National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, Miller responded that Prime Minister Netanyahu and other Israeli officials had reassured the United States that those statements did not reflect Israeli government policy. 

It is noteworthy that Smotrich and Ben Gvir's statements came in the wake of a meeting of Likud Party leaders, where Netanyahu himself said that his plan is to continue the massacre so that the residents of Gaza have no choice but to leave or die.

The Genocide Convention, drawn up in 1948 after World War II and the killing of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, describes the crime of genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or nationalistic people.” religious group.” The acts include killing members of the group or causing serious physical or mental harm to them,

The Hague cannot enforce its decisions, and it is possible that Israel could ignore a negative ruling, but this would only increase international condemnation of its military campaign.