On January 26, 2025, it has been one year since the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, at the behest of the Republic of South Africa, announced its decision to open a formal case against the State of Israel. As a result of the initial hearings, provisional measures were instituted due to the ICJ’s assertion that the right of Palestinians to be protected from genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was likely violated and that continuing acts were being conducted by the State of Israel that were possibly genocidal.
medico welcome the Court’s decision and its ordering of six binding provisional measures to prevent Israel from committing acts that could constitute genocide. At the same time, we criticised the German government for its siding with the government of Israel and its essentially unconditional, including military, support to it. We also called out the German government’s rejection of the serious and well documented South African allegations as Berlin called the accusation of genocide “baseless,” thus trivialising the gravity of the case and openly undermining, if not calling into question, the Court’s authority.
At the time, we ourselves stuck to the terms “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity” as we were convinced these had been and were being committed against the Palestinians, not only in Gaza, but also on the West Bank.
Disregard of the ICJ
As can be seen from the reality in Gaza, the Israeli government and its armed forces chose not only to by and large disregard the provisional measures ordered by the ICJ; on the contrary, they chose to make an already unbearable situation worse and actively deteriorated it on so many levels since. The Israeli armed forces, on behalf of their government, have systematically destroyed most of the Gaza Strip; they have displaced the majority of its population multiple times and destroyed their material basis of subsistence, killed tens of thousands of civilians including through the use of AI-based “target identification,” physically maimed permanently or injured tens of thousands more, attacked protected facilities such as hospitals, schools, mosques, and churches, and ethnically cleansed North Gaza.
In summary, it went on to do precisely what the ICJ had ordered it not to do, if it wanted to avoid the risk of committing a genocide as defined in the Convention as, among other acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” by “killing members of the group” or “causing serious bodily or mental harm”.
In other situations where war on Gaza was conducted by Israel, medico has funded and initiated various fact-finding missions with Palestinian and Israeli partners. These were done to determine the extent of killings, destruction, and needs in the Strip. Due to the wholesale killings, destruction and near-hermetic sealing of the enclave wrought on by Israel since October 2023, this has been impossible to do. As a result, we rely on our partners, legal and academic scholars, and experienced allies across the world, who have created a plethora of reports, documentaries, and investigative pieces regarding Israeli policy and annihilation in Gaza.
The conclusion is clear, and medico shares this analysis, that Israeli actions constitute genocide. Even though ICJ proceedings are still ongoing, the voluminous in-depth investigations by international human rights organizations and the documentation by local organizations, including long-standing partners of medico international, are too abundant to ignore. Therefore, medico will embrace usage of the term “genocide” to describe actions of the Israeli state in Gaza since October 2023.
