WhatsappWith the start of the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) trial beginning today at the Hague, families of hostages and supporters travelled there and marched on the streets.
One of the baffling things about the South African suit against Israel is the lack of mentioning f any of the Hamas atrocities against Israeli civilians on October 7th. Their charges exist in a vacuum.
The South African delegation called the Gaza Strip a concentration camp and compared it to “the killing fields of Cambodia” where the Khmer Rouge regime murdered more than one million people in the late 1970s. “You have heard from us about the direct extermination of thousands of people and children of the Palestinian population in Gaza since 7 October last year,” said one speaker, Max du Plessis.
They used quotes from Prime Minister Netanyahu referring to Hamas as Malek out of context as well as claiming a mass extermination of Gazans. The problem with their logic is that it conveniently ignores the fact that when similar conflicts have happened like the allies against ISIS, far more non-combatants were killed.
“Palestinians in Gaza are being killed by Israeli weaponry and bombs from air, land, and sea. They are also at immediate risk of death from starvation and disease, due to the destruction of Palestinians towns, the limited aid being allowed in, and the impossibility of distributing aid as the bombs fall. This makes life impossible,” said Adila Hassim. “Israel has killed an unparalleled and unprecedented number of civilians, with the full knowledge of how many lives each bomb will take,” she alleged.
“Palestinians have been killed in mosques, schools and hospitals. The level of killing is so extensive that bodies are often buried in mass graves, and are often unidentified,” she continued.
In response, Israel’s foreign ministry said the following:
“South Africa, which is functioning as the legal arm of the Hamas terrorist organization, utterly distorted the reality in Gaza following the October 7 massacre and completely ignored the fact that Hamas terrorists infiltrated Israel, murdered, executed, massacred, raped and abducted Israeli citizens, simply because they were Israelis, in an attempt to carry out genocide,” the ministry said.
“South Africa seeks to allow Hamas to return to commit the war crimes, crimes against humanity and sexual crimes they committed repeatedly on October 7, as its leaders have stated,” it added.
