The Palestinian Hamas resistance movement has lauded South Africa for filing a case against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) over crimes of genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip after nearly three months of relentless air and ground strikes.
The Gaza-based group described South Africa's application as “a significant step to punish the leaders of the Zionist entity and present-day criminals, who have committed the most heinous murders in modern history.”
“We call upon all world countries to adopt a similar measure against the Zionist Nazi regime both at national and international courts of law. The regime threatens international peace and security, and must not be allowed to escape punishment for the brutal crimes it has perpetrated against children and defenseless civilians in Gaza,” the Hamas’s statement read.
In an application to the ICJ, also called the World Court, on Friday, South Africa described Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group”.
“The acts in question include killing Palestinians in Gaza, causing them serious bodily and mental harm, and inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction,” the application said.
South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has compared Israel’s policies in Gaza and the occupied West Bank with his country’s past apartheid system, which saw the minority white population rule the majority black nation using a system based on segregation as its base. The white-minority rule ended in 1994.
Israel waged the bloody war on the Gaza Strip on October 7 after Hamas fighters and members of other resistance factions launched Operation al-Aqsa Storm in the occupied territories in retaliation for the Tel Aviv regime’s incessant crimes against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
Since the start of the aggression, Israel has killed more than 21,600 Palestinians, mostly women and children. It has also imposed a complete siege on the territory, cutting off fuel, electricity, food and water to the more than two million Palestinians living there.
