World Court hears pleas for justice for Palestinians

On the first of five days of hearings at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, made an impassioned presentation.

“We are proud of being Palestinians,” Mansour said. “Being Palestinian comes with its share of pain, and it has never been more painful to be Palestinian than today.”

Mansour urged the ICJ judges to help deliver justice in Palestine. “Help us to move in that direction and to have justice for the Palestinian people,” he said.

He told the ICJ judges: "Israel annexes our land. It kills, dispossesses, and displaces to destroy our people. It steals our resources and revenues. It fragments our territory. It severely restricts our movement and access.

“From the 18-year blockade over Gaza to the nearly 1,000 military checkpoints and obstacles to access and movement in the West Bank, to the attempts to sever East Jerusalem from its Palestinian environment. Israel systematically created our dependency on aid and then deliberately deprived us of this aid.”

Mansour said Israel’s aims were “to entrench its unlawful presence, to deny us our right to self-determination, to dispossess, displace and destroy our people, to colonise and annex our land”. Israel, Mansour said, was openly confessing to these goals.

“Kill and displace; destroy to replace. Get rid of Palestinian demography to seize Palestinian geography,” he told the court. “The methods are illegal and inhumane. The real objectives pursued are unlawful and the means deployed are criminal.”

Mansour’s emotions come close to the surface when he speaks about the suffering of Palestinian children.

“We want life and liberty and dignity in our land and in our children's lifetime,” he told the court.

“Instead, our children are being killed, orphaned, amputated, traumatised, displaced, humiliated, witnessing and enduring what no child should witness or endure. Those who survive will never fully recover from this nightmare.”

This week’s hearings are in response to a request from the General Assembly of the United Nations for the ICJ’s advisory opinion on “the Obligations of Israel in relation to the Presence and Activities of the United Nations, Other International Organisations and Third States in and in relation to the Occupied Palestinian Territory”.

In addition to those speaking on behalf of Palestine, representatives of the UN, Egypt, and Malaysia made submissions yesterday (Monday). Thirty-six other states and three other international organisations have expressed their intention to participate in the oral proceedings before the court.

Israel will not participate in the hearings and has made its submission in writing.

Palestine’s ambassador to the Netherlands, Ammar Hijazi, told the ICJ judges that Israel was attempting to destroy Palestinian people and erase Palestine, including by barring and obstructing humanitarian organisations, thus also violating its obligations under the UN Charter and other instruments of international law.

"As I address you today,” Hijazi said, “the Palestinian people are being starved, bombed and forcibly displaced by Israel, their unlawful occupier. Israel has not allowed food, water, medicines and medical supplies, or fuel into Gaza for the past two months, a policy supported by the highest court in Israel, which rejected petitions to allow aid into Gaza."

He told the court: “Starvation is here. Humanitarian aid is being used as a weapon of war. All UN-supported bakeries in Gaza have been forced to shut their doors. Nine of every ten Palestinians have no access to safe drinking water.”

Hijazi added: “This legal and moral crisis is not 18 months old. Israel has been systemically dispossessing, uprooting, slaughtering, and imprisoning Palestinians in absolute, flagrant disregard for international law and the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people for 80 years now.

“It has done so with the intent to destroy our people and to thwart their realisation of self-determination in their homeland.”

Also speaking for Palestine, Irish barrister Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh told the ICJ judges: “Israel's acts are not just murderous and inhumane, they are genocidal, as the UN Commission of Inquiry and others have concluded, and as is the near consensus view across the human rights community.”

Ní Ghrálaigh cited Israel’s numerous violations of the ICJ’s orders. “Israel continues to block UN-mandated investigatory bodies from Gaza while destroying and burying evidence of its crimes,” she said.

“Despite the extraordinary efforts of Palestinian journalists, who are themselves repeatedly targeted and killed, so much remains undocumented.”

Ní Ghrálaigh said Israel was “egregiously breaching its obligations to respect the inviolability of UN premises and the immunity of UN premises, property, and assets” and was in egregious breach of its obligations to respect the privileges and immunities of UN officials.

Israel’s violations included its use of UN premises as military bases and its violent, lethal attacks on UN schools, shelters and healthcare facilities, which had been a feature of every large-scale military assault on Gaza since at least 2009, Ní Ghrálaigh said.

Since October 2023, Israel had attacked more than 310 UN facilities in Gaza, striking many repeatedly, she added.

“Israel violates the immunity of the UN officials, including by killing, injuring and unlawfully detaining them and subjecting them to violent interrogation and ill-treatment, including severe beatings, waterboarding, deprivation of food and water, and threats of extreme harm to their families,” Ní Ghrálaigh said.

She added: “Approximately one million children are being impacted particularly severely. Children are literally freezing and starving to death. They include 79 children, including eight newborn babies, who died during the particularly harsh cold weather of Christmas and New Year gone by.

“Gaza is now home to the largest cohort of child amputees in the world, the largest orphan crisis in modern history, and a whole generation in danger of suffering from stunting, causing irreparable physical and cognitive impairment.”

More than 15,600 Palestinian children had been killed violently in Gaza, Ní Ghrálaigh said.

“Tens of thousands more of Gaza's children are injured or missing and many of those surviving are so traumatised that they openly express the wish to die,” she told the court.

Also speaking for Palestine, Paul Reichler told the court that “killing and maiming hundreds of thousands, and starving and attempting to displace millions of Palestinians out of Palestine, amounts to no less than destroying them as a group”.

The UN’s Under-Secretary-General for Legal Affairs and UN legal counsel, Elinor Hammarskjöld, spoke at the start of yesterday’s hearing.

“In the advisory opinion of 19 July, 2024, this court concluded that Israel's assertion of sovereignty over and its annexation of certain parts of the Occupied Palestinian territory constitute a violation of the prohibition of the acquisition of territory by force,” she said.

“On this basis the court has authoritatively determined that Israel is not entitled to sovereignty over or to exercise sovereign powers in any part of the Occupied Palestinian Territory on account of its occupation.”

More to follow.

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