Wounded children, emaciated children, terrified children. Dead children. Mothers carrying children as they pilgrimage south, mothers lying bloodied on hospital floors, the bodies of mothers strewn in the streets; men searching desperately for food, men digging through the rubble to extract the dead before the animals do, men gunned down by Israeli soldiers… Buildings destroyed, vehicles destroyed, farmland razed and ruined, streets transformed to dirt paths; human remains mangled in the wreckage, explosions obliterating universities, mosques, hospitals, refugee camps. And a bizarre image on the horizon, of parachutes falling over Gaza with packages of food. An apocalyptic scene composed in chorus by the photos and videos of Palestinian survivors, by the cameras of Al Jazeera, by the Israeli army, Israeli soldiers, humanitarian aid organizations. They bear witness to a war without winners. A war in which all sides have lost. With an average of 85 children killed every day for the past six months, in Gaza there are no winners. Humanity itself has already lost.
No-one, of course, has lost more than the Palestinians. Six months since the start of the Israeli bombing campaign, more than 35,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than two-thirds of them women and children. More than 1.7 million people (80 percent of the Gazan population) have been displaced, and are now huddled in tents in Rafah, the town on the border with Egypt, with no food, water, electricity, or medicine. More than a million people in Gaza currently face “catastrophic” food shortages and dozens of children have already died of starvation. Israel keeps the border crossings closed and limits the entry of food.
“Nothing can justify the collective punishment of the Palestinian people in Gaza,” United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said last week.
Half a year has now passed since the attacks by Hamas —the Islamic fundamentalist group that controlled Gaza since 2007— which claimed the lives of roughly 1,200 people, the majority civilians, in Israeli territory. Hamas still holds 133 Israeli hostages and uses them as bargaining chips, but its military, political, and moral defeat has rendered the group’s return to administrative power in Gaza unviable.
Hamas is a political organization with a military wing, which before October 7 had an estimated 30,000 fighters. It has ruled Gaza since 2007, after winning the only elections ever held in the enclave.
In strictly military terms, Israel has won this operation. It has destroyed the subterranean infrastructure that Hamas used to mobilize fighters and traffic weapons; and it claims to have completely dismantled most of the Islamic organization’s battalions. In the process, the Israeli army has made Gaza uninhabitable. But this strictly military analysis is misleading. In reality, Israel has lost this war, too.
This is one among many paradoxes emerging from the rubble of Gaza.
In the days following the October 7 attacks, heads of state from the United States and Europe met with the Israeli Prime Minister to express their solidarity in person, to call for the immediate release of the hundreds of Israeli hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, and to reiterate Israel’s right to self-defense.
Two days after the Hamas attack, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant ordered a complete siege of the Gaza Strip. “There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel,” he said. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also declared that no food or medicine would enter Gaza from Israeli territory. “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,” Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, said.
One hundred and eighty eight days since the start of its operation against Gaza, Israel finds itself more isolated than ever, and the accusations of anti-Semitism that for decades proved so useful against any and all critics no longer prove so effective.
Israel has even lost the unconditional support of its main ally, arms supplier, and political protector: the United States. Last week, after a precision Israeli air strike on a convoy of aid workers killed seven staff members from the international relief organization World Central Kitchen (including a U.S. American, an Australian, and a Brit), President Biden warned Netanyahu that continued U.S. support would depend on a radical shift in actions taken to protect civilian lives.
On March 25, the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously (14 votes in favor, with only one abstention, from the United States) for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for an end to restrictions on the entry of humanitarian aid. Hours later, Al Jazeera reporters in the Strip reported that nothing on the ground had changed. The shelling continued throughout the night of March 25 to 26, and local reports confirmed the deaths of 81 people in those attacks, including 12 refugees who were killed when Israel bombed their tent in Rafah. The next day, another 76 people were killed.
Adding the sum of those 48 hours, the death toll rose to 32,490 (to measure the human loss, try counting one by one up to that number). It is estimated that another 15,000 people are still missing under the rubble. More than 70,000 wounded fill the few hospitals left standing, where they are treated without lights, without anesthesia, and without beds to receive them.
In late March, the U.N. Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Fabrizia Albanese, issued a report titled “Anatomy of a Genocide.” “By analyzing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met,” the document reads. “More broadly, they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signaling a tragedy foretold.”
The European Union’s foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, one of Israel’s most outspoken critics, recently said that Gaza has gone from being the world’s largest open-air prison to “the world’s greatest open-air graveyard.” Gaza, the E.U.’s top diplomat added, has also become “a graveyard for many of the most important principles of humanitarian law.”
In the days following the Security Council vote, the Israeli army imposed a military siege on Al Shifa Hospital, the main medical complex in Gaza, where hundreds of people had taken shelter and where medical personnel worked miracles to treat massive numbers of patients wounded in the bombings, amputating limbs without anesthesia or basic medicines. The Israeli army attacked the hospital over the course of two weeks, then abandoned it, completely destroyed, after killing over a hundred people.
Israel claims that Hamas fighters hide in hospitals, and that during their military operation at Al Shifa they managed to kill many combatants — but there are no independent verifications of this claim. The Norwegian doctor Mads Gilbert, who has provided care at Al Shifa for 16 years, reacted indignantly to the military operation. Speaking from Norway, he told Al Jazeera: “What would happen if a foreign army attacked an Israeli hospital, leaving Israeli patients without food, electricity, and medicine? We already know what would happen. The world would stop it immediately. What we are seeing in Gaza is not a military or political operation. It’s pure racism. It’s pure sadism.”
The international organization Oxfam echoed the denunciations, accusing Israel of deliberately starving the Palestinian population, which has been forced to survive on an average of 245 calories a day — the equivalent of less than one can of beans. Today, people in Gaza consume less than 15 percent of the minimum calories necessary for a human being. “The Israeli government has known for nearly two decades exactly how many daily calories are needed to prevent malnutrition in Gaza, calculating this according to both age and gender within its Food Consumption in the Gaza Strip – Red Line document,” Oxfam says. “Not only did it use a higher calculation of 2,279 calories per person, it also took into account domestic food production in Gaza, which the Israeli military has now virtually obliterated.”
That is to say, for two decades, Israel has restricted the entry of food aid into Gaza to maintain the population under conditions of bare minimum consumption.
Last week, the U.N. Human Rights Council overwhelmingly approved a resolution to hold Israel accountable for war crimes and crimes against humanity, and to prohibit other countries from selling arms to the Israeli state.
As the world stands horrified before the plight of the Palestinians, a new generation is coming of age that sees Israel as a belligerent, cruel, and colonialist country. These past six months have focused the world’s attention on the decades-long Israeli occupation of the Palestinians, the dispossession of their land, and the control over their lives.
“The attacks by Hamas did not happen in a vacuum,” Guterres said in late October. “The Palestinian people have been subjected to 56 years of suffocating occupation.”
Life under the Bombs
Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish smiles even when he cries. It’s his eyes that betray his state of mind. But today, they are serene, conciliatory, as we speak inside the National Theater in The Hague, where he has just presented the documentary “I Shall Not Hate,” based on his personal tragedy and that of the Palestinian people. “What we are experiencing now in Gaza is our Holocaust,” he tells me and several students who approach him after the film, speaking almost in a whisper. “But we can’t even say that, because [the Israelis] have monopolized that word, too. Holocaust.”
Abuelaish, a five-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, had already acquired a reputation as a peacemaker by the time that the documentary euphemistically calls “the tragedy” occurred. He insisted, and still insists, that children come into the world without prejudice and that doctors should treat patients in an emergency without consideration of skin color or religion. He was the first Palestinian doctor to work in an Israeli hospital, which required him to pass through austere Israeli checkpoints every day to get from his home in Gaza to the hospital in Tel Aviv, and again every night on his way back.
During one of the numerous Israeli military campaigns against Gaza, in early 2009, the doctor found himself the focus of television viewers across Israel, to whom he would recount, every day, what it was like to live under the bombs.
On January 16, a tank positioned opposite his building fired three shells directly at his apartment, killing three of his daughters and one of his nieces. He was there, too, and watched his daughters die. The tank maintained its position; five of his other children were still alive (his wife had died of leukemia the year before). He called the TV station and, on air, over the phone, Dr. Abuelaish shouted his irrepressible laments in front of his murdered daughters. “I care for Israeli patients, and this is what they do to me? This is peace?” The call succeeded in stopping the attack on his home, and his other children survived.
This was in 2009. Later, the doctor emigrated to Toronto with his surviving children and Gaza endured another four Israeli military assaults over the course of the next fifteen years.
But moving to Canada did not mean an end to the family’s tragedy. In this most recent Israeli offensive against Gaza, 22 of Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish’s other relatives have been killed. Twenty-two in total. And he names them, and remembers them, one by one.
“Someone has to stop this genocide against the Palestinians, immediately,” he says. “It’s clear now, to everyone, that we live in an upside-down world, with double standards. The Palestinian tragedy is putting humanity to the test.” Abuelaish is aware of where he says these things. He is in The Hague, the capital of international justice, home of the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court; home of Scheveningen Prison, where perpetrators of the Bosnian genocide and others accused of crimes against humanity now find themselves locked behind bars.
“Neither the people nor history will forgive what they are doing,” Abuelaish says, gesturing with open hands. “One day, they will be judged. The Hague is a city of peace and justice, but they need to take action now, not later. People in Gaza are dying, they are starving. He who has his hands in cold water sees things differently than he who has his hands in boiling water, under fire and with no water,” he says.
The Other War
A month ago, in Amsterdam, I found myself at a protest. Under a sea of Palestinian flags, children, students, women, men, and more than a few elderly people in wheelchairs or with canes were walking, shouting, and singing together. Some 2,000 people gathered at Waterlooplein Square, in front of the Portuguese Synagogue, whose domes were barely visible because between the two forms —the architectural and the human— stood a wall of police: a dense barrier of vehicles and dozens of officers.
Inside the synagogue, the King of the Netherlands, Willem Alexander, was inaugurating the National Holocaust Museum. Israeli President Isaac Herzog, a special guest at the event, took the floor: “At this pivotal moment in time, this institution sends a clear powerful statement,” Herzog said. “Remember! Remember the horrors born of hatred, antisemitism, and racism, and never again allow them to flourish.”
In Holland, where the Nazi occupation murdered three-quarters of the Jewish population; in Amsterdam, the city of Anne Frank; here, the Israeli president was commemorating the Holocaust while outside, a massive crowd of people was accusing him of perpetrating another genocide. It was not, as Herzog characterizes all of Israel’s critics, an anti-Semitic protest. It could not be, because the demonstration was organized by Erev Rav, a local Jewish organization that prior to Herzog’s visit had filed a lawsuit against him, demanding the president’s arrest for genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.
Six weeks earlier, the Israeli president had blamed the entire Palestinian population for the attacks perpetrated by Hamas in October 2023: “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible. It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up. They could have fought against that evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.”
Late last year, Herzog was photographed signing one of the bombs that would be dropped on Gaza. Now, he was received as a guest of honor in Amsterdam.
In the square, the chants were growing louder: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!”; “Never Again is Now!”; “Israel, you can’t hide, you’re committing genocide!”; “Herzog murderer, in jail for 100 years.” The signs also spoke for those who held them: “Descendant of Holocaust victims. Never again”; “I am a Jew against the genocide of the Palestinian people”; “Herzog to The Hague.” Some demonstrators wore kippahs —traditional Jewish caps— but red ones with black dots and a green border, like the watermelon that became a symbol for Palestine after Israel banned public displays of its flag.
But not everything was so civilized. A few demonstrators insulted guests attending the inauguration of the Holocaust Museum, yelling epithets over a line of police protecting them. A few shouts of “Juden raus!” (Jews out!) aimed at elderly people —some of them survivors of the Holocaust— and children who had been invited to the ceremony were enough to shake the national conscience and set off alarm bells of anti-Semitism. They yelled this in German, uttering the same words as their Nazi occupiers.
Hanneke Gelderblom was especially outraged. A Dutch Jew, she survived the Nazi occupation, separated from her family, by hiding in the homes of strangers at the age of six. It was only after the war that she reunited with her mother and learned that her father had died in Auschwitz, attempting to escape. She is one of the few Holocaust survivors in the Netherlands. Strangely, they forgot to invite her to the opening ceremony of the Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, but she saw the protests on television, and heard the shouts aimed at fellow Jews.
Mrs. Hanneke is 88 years old, but her age is disguised by her youthful energy for walking, gesturing, and speaking. She served as a Dutch senator and participated in the Oslo negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. Now, she is a member of a group of women from different religions who discuss how to contribute to peace. Like Dr. Abuelaish, she proclaims herself a pacifist and believes that dialogue is the only way for Israelis and Palestinians to coexist. “We need more Palestinians like him,” she tells me. “We need more voices for peace. But peace is not achieved with protests and flags and red-stained hands insulting everyone.”
She lives in Belgisch Park, a beautiful neighborhood in The Hague, near Scheveningen, home of the prison for international war criminals (where former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic spent the last of his days), and the Oranje Hotel, a former prison converted into a museum, where the Nazis once incarcerated Jews and members of the Dutch resistance before executing them or transporting them to other internment centers like Westerbork, in the north of the country, and then by train to concentration camps.
Mrs. Hanneke lives here with her husband, Hans Geldenbom, an architect who designed the house to fill with proverbial Dutch light, which pours in through the windows. “I’ve walked the path of peace all my life,” she says.
Her relationship with Israel is peculiar. She considers herself Dutch and says that she never wanted to move there, that she wanted to build peace from here, from her country. But, she clarifies, Jews “have always been a minority, for 2,000 years. There is only one place where Jewish holidays are national holidays. One small part of the world where we are no longer just a tolerated minority. That’s why Israel is necessary and must remain a small state in the Middle East.” Peace is difficult, she says, but it is the only way.
I ask her what made her so upset about the Amsterdam demonstration.
“Because it was an insult to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust.”
“But they were protesting the presence of Israeli President Isaac Herzog…”
“I think his presence was justified.”
“Can you explain?”
“The ceremony was planned more than a year ago, not recently. And he said himself, ‘I also represent Dutch Jews who survived the Holocaust and moved to Israel.’”
“Does he also represent you?”
“I don’t live in Israel. My home is Holland.”
“What would you have said to Herzog if you had met him?”
“That the only way to eliminate Hamas is to make peace with the Palestinians. Hamas wants to start a religious war in the Middle East. They believe Israel doesn’t have a right to exist.”
“Do you not think it worthy of protest that the guest of honor at a commemoration for genocide is someone who stands accused in this very city of complicity in genocide? I want to understand why you were so upset by the protest.”
“After the Holocaust, Jews in my country were promised that we would never again hear anyone shout ‘Jews out’ at us. I heard it again that day. Fortunately, I was not invited, so I only saw it on TV. Protestors shouting ‘Jews out.’ Never again is never again!
“But there’s a paradox, isn’t there? The fact that he attended the opening of a museum dedicated to saying never again will we allow another genocide, when he himself is accused of perpetrating another genocide.”
“But Gaza didn’t just happen out of the blue. It happened after the October 7th attacks. Nobody talks about the hostages anymore. Let’s be clear about one thing: what is happening is appalling and must stop now. Netanyahu has to go. He is the most problematic leader Israel has ever had, and he is endangering Israel’s existence. The thought of that is frightening.”
The Breaking Point
Israel’s isolation began in earnest on January 10, at the International Court of Justice. On that day, hearings opened in a case officially known as South Africa v. Israel.
The ICJ is a court of the United Nations, created in 1946 —its first president was a Salvadoran: José Gustavo Guerrero— and given two functions: to resolve disputes between nations and to provide legal opinions on international conflicts.
The Court is headquartered at the Peace Palace in The Hague, and is the highest-level international court for settling disputes between nations, not individuals; for individual charges of war crimes or crimes against humanity, there is another court, the International Criminal Court. I first visited the Peace Palace in December 2003 as a journalist working for the Salvadoran newspaper La Prensa Gráfica, when the ICJ denied El Salvador’s territorial claims in a border dispute with Honduras.
During that visit, I was shocked to see that what for El Salvador and Honduras was an issue of existential importance was merely a routine procedure for the court. The Salvadoran and Honduran delegations were expectant, hoping for a resolution in their favor, anxious for a definitive verdict; yet all around them, everything moved with a contrasting ordinariness. Lawyers, diplomats, tour guides, and administrative staff filed through the corridors, absolutely indifferent to the fate of Meanguera Island.
This is true in every court in the world: Judges, prosecutors, lawyers, and clerks go through their daily routines, while the person being judged receives a verdict that will change their life.
This was not the case in January.
The side doors to the courtroom opened at ten in the morning and the seventeen ICJ judges took their seats, dressed in black robes. Everyone —those of us inside the Peace Palace and those protesting against Israel outside— knew that a historic hearing was about to begin. Seventy-five years after its founding out of the ashes of the Holocaust, Israel stood before the highest court in the world accused of committing genocide against the Palestinian people.
The accusation against Israel was brought by South Africa, on the grounds that all states signatory to the Genocide Convention are obligated to prevent genocide. And in Gaza, South Africa argued, there is evidence that Israel has violated the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: indiscriminate killings of Palestinians; causing severe physical and mental harm to the Palestinian population; mass expulsion from homes and forced displacement; and deprivation of access to adequate food and water.
In particular, South Africa accused Israel of violating four components of Article II of the Genocide Convention, which defines the crime of genocide as the deliberate attempt to destroy a national, religious, ethnic, or religious group through the killing of its members, causing serious bodily or mental harm, inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s physical destruction; imposing measures to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
The delegation also accused Israel of violating Article III of the convention, pertaining to the public incitement to commit genocide, based on statements made by multiple Israeli government and military officials —including Prime Minister Netanyahu, the president, the defense minister, and members of his cabinet, as well as various government ambassadors and military officers— that call for the total destruction of Gaza and the elimination of Palestinians. Official speech that dehumanizes and stigmatizes the victim group is a common form of evidence referenced in past cases of genocide heard by the ICJ, such as those of Bosnia, Myanmar, and Rwanda.
“Israel has a genocidal intent against the Palestinians living in Gaza,” South African lawyer Tembeka Ngcukaitobi told the ICJ judges. “That is evident from the way in which Israel’s military attack is being conducted.” One by one, seven South African representatives presented evidence of this intent: 25 percent of the entire Gazan population had been injured in four months of military siege; one percent had been killed; inhabitants forcefully displaced to places without the minimum conditions necessary for life; the destruction of all infrastructure.
South Africa also presented statements from Israeli government officials, echoed by Israeli soldiers, as evidence of genocidal intent. Among these were the statements made by President Isaac Herzog holding all Palestinians responsible for the Hamas attacks. And those of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, from October 2023, when he reminded his troops of the Jewish belief that God had commanded Saul to kill all Amalekite men, women, and children. “Remember Amalek,” Netanyahu told them. And from Defense Minister Yoav Galant, who said “we are fighting human animals,” while announcing that Israel would cut off all water and electricity in the Strip. The hearing was a resounding accumulation of accusations against Israel.
It was not only that Israel stood accused of violating the Genocide Convention, created in 1948 to prevent another attempt by Nazis to eradicate the Jewish people from ever happening again. It was not only that the accusation came from South Africa, a global symbol of victory against racism and apartheid. With this hearing, the relevance of the international justice system itself was on trial.
At that point, Gaza had endured 100 days of uninterrupted bombardment, and the Israeli army had already killed more than 25,000 Palestinians. That was almost three months ago.
“Israel has deliberately imposed conditions on Gaza that cannot sustain life and are calculated to bring about its physical destruction,” Dr. Adila Hassim, one of eight members of the South African delegation, told the Court. “There is nowhere safe for them to flee to.”
“Israel deployed 6,000 bombs per week,” Dr. Hassim continued. “At least 200 times, it has deployed two-thousand-pound bombs in southern areas of Palestine designated as ‘safe.’ These bombs have also decimated the north, including refugee camps. […] This killing is nothing short of destruction of Palestinian life. It is inflicted deliberately. No one is spared, not even newborn babies. The scale of Palestinian child killings in Gaza is such that United Nations chiefs have described it as ‘a graveyard for children.’”
It is difficult to ignore the historical magnitude and political implications of these accusations. The Genocide Convention was created the same year as the State of Israel, in 1948, in response to the world’s determination that never again would a genocide be recorded in the archives of history, or a state be allowed to systematically attempt to wipe out an entire people, as the Germans had done to the Jews. (Israel was among the first states to sign and ratify the convention.)
Perhaps at no other point since its founding has Israel faced so many accusations from so many different fronts. Chile and Mexico have officially requested that the International Criminal Court open investigations into crimes against humanity in Israel and the Occupied Territories; Indonesia has filed a complaint against Israel for its “colonialist” occupation of Palestine; and Swiss prosecutors have announced that they are opening investigations into criminal allegations against Israeli President Isaac Herzog.
But none of these actions carry the consequences for the global order that the ICJ’s judgment in this case could have. South Africa requested that the Court, while determining whether Israel had committed genocide, issue interim measures to prevent it from continuing to potentially do so.
On January 26, the Court ruled on the South African application, finding it “plausible” that Israel had violated the Genocide Convention. It ordered Israel, among other things, to immediately allow entry of humanitarian aid into Gaza and to punish any official who issued genocidal statements against the Palestinian people. Israel, in response, accused South Africa of anti-Semitism. The other ruling, to determine whether Israel has committed genocide, could take years.
“Genocide is not characterized by the severity of the acts committed or by the number of deaths,” says Reed Brody, a lawyer with expertise in human rights and crimes against humanity. “It is characterized by intent.” And intent is the hardest thing to prove. “But this case is historic, because it finally inserts the law. We have been helplessly witnessing the destruction of Gaza for months. But Israel no longer has a blank check. Now everyone is watching and judging the legality of its actions, and these will have repercussions in international forums.”
In March, the ICJ began hearing a new case against Israel, to determine whether the state has practiced or is practicing policies of colonialism and apartheid in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.
What is at stake at the ICJ is the relevance of international courts themselves. If Israel, protected by the United States in international forums, decides to disregard the rulings, as it has done so far, the Court’s existence is rendered meaningless. A court only has authority if its rulings are complied with. Regardless, if the ICJ determines that Israel is committing genocide, the United States, legally speaking, will no longer be a protector of Israel, but an accomplice to genocide.
The arguments of Israel and South Africa showed perhaps the most conspicuous hole in public debate. The two delegations and most of the rest of the world agree that the attacks by Hamas on October 7 were atrocious, unacceptable, and deserving of condemnation; and all states have the right to legitimate self-defense. But how, then, can the Palestinians exercise their legitimate right to self-defense after decades of dispossession, expulsions, apartheid, bombings, and attacks against them? How can they exercise this right if they have no army, if they are occupied by another state, if they do not control the distribution of water, electricity, and food, if they are not even recognized as a state? The international community has yet to provide them with an answer.
“I would accept the deaths of my daughters if that was the sacrifice required to end this occupation,” Dr. Abuelaish says. “But it’s not. This didn’t start on October 7 of last year. My daughters were killed in 2009. They are still killing us.”
*Translated by Max Granger
