PRETORIA, South Africa – On January 11th, South Africa will present a case to the UN’s International Court of Justice, accusing Israel of committing genocide in Gaza. This move comes amid mounting outrage at Israel’s offensive in the territory, with Palestinians and other countries echoing similar allegations.
The term “genocide” has been used by protesters, commentators, and even the director of the New York office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to describe the situation in Gaza. Israel has vehemently denied committing genocide and instead accused Hamas of the crime.
The UN adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in December 1948, defining genocide as acts intended to destroy a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. The convention states that deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about physical destruction, inflicting serious bodily or mental harm, measures intended to prevent births, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group all constitute genocide.
Interpretations of the convention’s definition of genocide vary, with examples like the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis and the organized killing of ethnic Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994 serving as clear instances. However, cases like Darfur in Sudan and the treatment of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang by the Chinese government have sparked debates on whether they qualify as genocide.
According to the UN definition, Hamas’s founding charter, which explicitly commits to obliterating Israel, could be seen as genocidal. On the other hand, Israel’s actions do not meet the test of genocide, though some accuse it of inflicting serious harm on Palestinians and displacing large numbers of people from Gaza.
Even if an army’s actions do not meet the threshold of genocide, they can still be deemed as crimes against humanity and war crimes, as concluded by the UN in its report on Darfur.