Court of Justice: stop the Rafah offensive!
Today is another of those historic days that will be remembered in books. The International Court of Justice has ruled on South Africa’s long-awaited request for a ceasefire in Gaza. In reading the sentence, the head of the International Court of Justice Nawaf Salam, referring to the “disastrous” humanitarian situation underway in southern Gaza, ordered Israel to immediately suspend the offensive on the entire Rafah governorate, to withdraw of all forces deployed in the area and the immediate suspension of “any other action that could inflict living conditions on the Palestinian group in Gaza that could lead to its partial or total physical destruction”. Regarding the displaced Palestinians who were forced by Israel to leave the city, he added that “The Court is not convinced that the evacuation efforts and related measures that Israel claims to have undertaken to enhance the security of civilians in the Gaza Strip, and in particular those recently displaced from the Rafah governorate, are sufficient to alleviate the immense risk that the Palestinian population is exposed to due to the military offensive in Rafah”.
Salam, underlining Israel’s failure to comply with the provisional measures adopted in previous sentences issued on January 26 and March 28, added that Israel must reopen all border crossings “as soon as possible” and let in all humanitarian aid. necessary to alleviate “the degradation of the living conditions of civilians in Rafah”. Furthermore, effective immediately, to ensure that no evidence of possible war crimes disappears, he ordered Israel to “take effective measures to ensure free access to the Gaza Strip to any investigative and/or fact-finding commission mandated by the relevant United Nations bodies to investigate allegations of genocide”. Israel was also ordered to “report to the court within one month on the progress made in implementing the measures ordered in the ruling.” Should it fail to comply with the Court’s orders, and regardless of the degree of expected US support, Israel will face international sanctions and will be pitted against most Western governments, who are highly likely to abide by the Court’s ruling today. .
Satisfied South Africa who, in addition to applauding the strong decision taken by the ICJ, urged the member states of the United Nations to support it. The Palestinian Authority, through the Palestinian presidential spokesperson Nabil Abu Rudeina, also announced that the decision “represents an indispensable international consensus to put an end to the war in the Gaza Strip”.
A little less exultant Netanyahu who, according to sources disclosed by the Israeli channel Channel 13, will shortly convene an emergency meeting. According to what has been leaked, Foreign Minister Israel Katz, War Cabinet Minister Benny Gantz and the government’s judicial advisor are expected to attend the meeting.
The first reaction to the sentence came from the minister of Finance Bezalel Smotrich, who said that “those who ask the State of Israel to stop the war are as if they were asking it to cease to exist.” And then he added “We continue to fight for ourselves and for the entire free world. History will judge who today sided with the Nazis of Hamas and ISIS.”
The eradication and erasure of the Palestinians have always been Israel’s obsession, even before it was born. An obsession cultivated with only one big difference compared to the past: since 7 October the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people is no longer hidden but practiced blatantly and carried out with a view to a “total annihilation”, a concept that summarizes a project that the minister of Israeli Finance Smotrich has been in his drawer since 2006. And the one perpetrated by Israel is undoubtedly a carnage of industrial proportions never seen before: it is now close to 36,000 dead and over 80,000 injured, numbers to which we must add at least 10,000 missing. A machine of destruction that is also territorial, landscape, cultural, infrastructural, archaeological, and which has reduced the Strip to a strip of land and sand with an apocalyptic appearance. Wherever the most “moral and ethical army in the world” has passed, it has left only concrete dust, stumps of buildings and tons of corpses, many of which are hidden in dozens of mass graves that never stop coming to light, revealing to the world the the horror sown in Gaza by Israeli soldiers.
Horrors that Israel tries to hide by blocking televisions, prohibiting – from the beginning – journalists and external observers from accessing the Strip, seizing television equipment, spreading false accusations such as those that were circulated in the early hours of October 7 according to which children had been beheaded and others had been cooked in ovens. Or like the accusations, which later proved to be unfounded, made against the URNWA Agency in the aftermath of the order with which the International Court of Justice, rejecting the appeal made by Israel against the motion presented by South Africa, established six precautionary measures, including including “the obligation on Israel to refrain from acts covered by the Genocide Convention, to prevent and punish direct and public incitement to genocide, as well as to take immediate and effective measures to ensure assistance”.
The satellite images of Rafah, published yesterday by Hareetz, compared the before and after, revealing the degree of devastation already implemented by the Israeli army in its ground attack, despite claims to the contrary to date. A destruction that knows no respite even from the skies and that every day and every night sows dozens and dozens of victims, mostly women and children, in what has become the largest agglomeration of displaced persons camps in the world, and in which atrocities of mass are consumed continuously, like the rest of the Strip. Strengthened by impunity that for 76 years has granted Israel the license to kill, For months, Netanyahu has been declaring like a mantra that “No power in the world can stop us”. She reiterated it yesterday too. But the granite front on which you have counted until today has never been so crumbly. And it could collapse at any moment, as the wall of Jerusalem did under the blows of Titus’ Roman army almost two thousand years ago.
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