When South Africa filed its case (Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in the Gaza Strip – South Africa v Israel) at the International Court of Justice on December 29, 2023 (see the full case records and updates of the International Court of Justice here), the horrific assault on the Gaza Strip and its inhabitants was still in an early stage.

Today I read that children of the deplorable people in Gaza are still dying, having so far survived in the rubble while hardly protected from storm, flooding and cold. More than one year after a so-called, coerced, by Donald Trump’s infamous and laughable “Board of Peace”, ceasefire.

It will take years until a final verdict has been made at the ICJ. While in progressive and left-leaning media outlets it is long common place that Israel committed/commits genocide, former ICJ President Joan Donoghue has clarified, in a BBC Hardtalk interview, that the ICJ has ruled something else.

According to Donoghue the court only ruled Palestinians had a “plausible right” to be protected from genocide, and that there was a “real and imminent risk” of irreparable prejudice to those rights.

In Article 2 of the so-called Genocide Convention of 1948, the above Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG), genocide is defined any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

In particular the Genocidal Intent, or Dolus specialis, will be very difficult to prove. Dolus specialis (Latin for “special intent”) is the specific mental element required for genocide: the explicit, ulterior purpose to destroy a protected national, ethnical, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part; see the article by Kai Ambos.

Despite outcries after the horrible events of 7 October 2023, even by high ranking Israeli officials, government representatives, members of parliament, members of the armed forces, common people, evoking Amalek, or animals. If Israel had a genocidal intent, it would have expelled the surviving Palestinians into the Sinai. But make no mistake: mass killings or massacres are not required for an act to legally qualify as genocide.

The horrific war crimes committed in the three years following the Hamas attack—this time perpetrated by the State of Israel, specifically under the responsibility of its far-right government led by Prime Minister Netanyahu—must be investigated and prosecuted on the basis of existing international law; and this will indeed happen. It will take time. Whether the charge of genocide—the “crime of all crimes”—will ultimately be substantiated is a matter that will be decided by the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Within our system of international law, we have no other mechanisms at our disposal.

11 November 2026 @ 16:06 UTC+1.

Last modified November 11, 2026.