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Israel faces charges of genocide at the International Court of Justice. Here’s why, and how Israel will respond.
WASHINGTON (JTA) — Perhaps the most famous court case in Israel history was the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust. Next week, more than 60 years later, lawyers for the Israeli government will again grapple with an allegation of genocide — but this time as defendants and not as prosecutors.
That grim history helps explain why Israel has chosen to engage with the International Court of Justice, which will weigh a claim by South Africa that Israel is committing genocide in its war against Hamas in Gaza. Israel is furious at the accusation, which it called a perversion of the genocide charge.
The ICJ will base its judgment on the 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention, which Israel joined almost as soon as the state was established because the convention was written in the wake of the Holocaust, in hopes of preventing another genocide.
“Israel decided to send a legal team because this is an outrageous application by South Africa and we will defend ourselves against those lies,” Lior Hayat, the spokesman for Israel’s Foreign Ministry, said in an interview.
Here’s what’s behind the accusation, how Israel is defending it and what to anticipate.
Who is adjudicating the accusation, and when?
The International Court of Justice, based in The Hague in the Netherlands, adjudicates claims against states. In the past it has considered disputes on everything from maritime border disputes to the United States’ funding of the Contras rebel groups in Nicaragua in the 1980s. The court, first convened in 1946, is the culmination of a series of international conferences that aimed to adjudicate disputes between nations as a means of preventing war.
The court has previously considered cases involving Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, the moving of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and an incident in 1955 in which an El Al flight was shot down over Bulgarian airspace.
The International Criminal Court in the same city adjudicates criminal allegations against individuals, such as generals or notorious despots including Libya’s Muammar Ghaddafi and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The case was initiated late last month by South Africa, and the first hearings are next week, Jan. 11 and 12.
Why is Israel participating?
Israel has a tradition of not engaging with war crimes accusations against its officials, in part because it is not party to the 2002 compact that created the International Criminal Court. In light of the United Nations’ repeated votes and other measures placing blame on Israel, Israel sees the U.N. system as irredeemably biased, and feels that the charges are likely to be loaded.
But Israeli officials say the charge of genocide is too much for a state born in the ashes of the Holocaust to ignore.
“The State of Israel will appear before the International Court of Justice at The Hague to dispel South Africa’s absurd blood libel,” Eylon Levy, a government spokesman, said on Jan. 2.
Rumors have circulated that Alan Dershowitz, the emeritus Harvard Law professor and Israel advocate, will be part of Israel’s legal team, though he has not confirmed his participation. Dershowitz has been on the legal teams of other famous defendants, including O.J. Simpson and, more recently, President Donald Trump during his first impeachment trial. He did not reply to a request for comment.
Beyond seeking to stake a moral defense against a crime it has prosecuted against Nazi war criminals, there are practical reasons for Israel to participate. The ICJ’s process may take years, but if after next week’s hearing it finds enough evidence to go forward, it may call on the parties in the Gaza war to cease hostilities.
Such a court order would establish a legal basis for countries to boycott and isolate Israel and to restrict the movement of its officials if Israel does not comply.
Two years ago, Ukraine sought and received a similar order from the court in its efforts to repel Russia’s invasion. But while both cases involve genocide, the Russia and Israel trials differ: Ukraine is not accusing Russia of genocide. Rather, it went to the ICJ to contest Russia’s accusation that Ukraine is committing genocide — which Putin has cited as a pretext for the war.
Russia, which is massive and has built an insular economy, ignored the order. But Israel, a small country allied with the West, can’t afford to make the same choice, said Orde Kittrie, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an influential Washington think tank with close ties to Israel’s government.
“If Israel is ordered to do what Russia [was] ordered to do, which would be to immediately suspend its military operations, it would certainly be bad for Israel from a PR perspective,” said Kittrie, who is a law professor at Arizona State University. “You don’t want to be violating international law. You don’t want to be fighting when you’ve been told to stop.”
The Biden administration has indicated that it will not honor any injunctions targeting Israel as a result of the genocide charges. “We find this submission meritless, counterproductive, and completely without any basis in fact whatsoever,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said on Wednesday.
Pro-Palestinian protestors supporting the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel in Cape Town, South Africa, Sept. 21, 2015. Michelly Rall/Getty Images)
Why is South Africa making the charge?
South Africa’s government sees itself as a bulwark against what it casts as western imperialism. It also wants to push back against perceptions in the West that, since the end of apartheid in the early 1990s, it has devolved into corruption, authoritarianism and alliances with repressive regimes.
In 2017, it ignored an ICC warrant for the arrest of then-Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir on genocide charges, allowing him to enter the country.
In addition to the genocide accusation, it has embraced charges that Israel is guilty of apartheid, the crime of institutionalized racial discrimination that was South Africa’s hallmark under white minority rule for decades. Its leaders have never forgiven Israel for cozying up to the apartheid regime. Its parliament in November, in a non-binding vote, said the government should expel Israeli diplomats.
“South Africa has been engaged on the Palestinian issue since really the end of apartheid and the founding of the state,” Michael Walsh, a visiting scholar at the University of California Berkeley, told Vox. “It’s been a prominent issue in South African politics and among South African leaders.”
What is the basis for the genocide accusation?
Pro-Palestinian activists and anti-Zionist figures have been accusing Israel of genocide since the earliest days of the war — an allegation Israeli and other scholars across the political spectrum have strenuously denied both in this conflict and previous rounds of fighting. (A recent letter by a group of Israeli public figures — unconnected with the ICJ case — did accuse some Israeli officials of incitement to genocide, though not of the crime of genocide itself.)
South Africa’s charging document in the ICJ case, which outlines what it calls acts of genocide and also intent, relies on many of the same arguments pro-Palestinian activists have made in recent months.
The acts are drawn from news accounts of the carnage, which according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry has topped 22,000 Palestinian casualties, including thousands of children. That number doesn’t differentiate between civilians and combatants.
Also included are warnings by international bodies that the population of the enclave is on the verge of mass starvation and disease. “The acts in which Israel has engaged … are genocidal in character, having regard to their nature, scope and context,” the charging document says.
In seeking to establish intent, South Africa quotes statements by Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, that South Africa claims are genocidal in scope.
That is an “extraordinarily challenging” standard to meet, according to an analysis by Alaa Hachem and Oona Hathaway at Just Security, an online security think tank run out of the New York University School of Law. “It requires proof of a specific intent to destroy a group in whole or in part.”
The South African charging document quotes a speech Netanyahu delivered to the Knesset, describing the war as “a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle,” which South Africa called a “a dehumanizing theme to which he returned on various occasions.”
That quote and some of the others in the document, the FDD’s Kittrie noted, refer not to the Palestinians as a whole but to Hamas. Kittrie said that Israeli leaders on other occasions have made clear that their war is with the terrorist group that launched the conflict with massacres that took the lives of some 1,200 people, most of them civilians, on Oct. 7.
“Our war against Hamas, the Hamas terrorist organization, is a war — it’s not a war against the people of Gaza,” Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said last month at a press conference with Lloyd Austin, the U.S. defense secretary.
Smoke is seen over Beit Hanoun in the Gaza Strip from the Israeli side of the border, Oct. 27, 2023. (Amir Levy/Getty Images)
Other more damning quotes cited in the document come from figures on the far right. It quotes for instance Amichai Eliahu, the minister of heritage who is a member of the Otzma Yehudit, or Jewish Power, party, who has said, “There is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza” and has called to nuke the territory.
Those figures are not making decisions in the war, Kittrie said. “The South Africans point to a few statements by members of the Knesset,” he said. “They take some statements out of context.”
That may be the case, said Yaniv Roznai, a law professor at Reichman University in Israel, but it is incumbent on Netanyahu and others to get their allies to avoid indulging fantasies of ethnic cleansing at an extraordinarily risky time.
“Instead of understanding that words have meanings, and that we are in wartime and to watch their mouths and not say really stupid things,” Netanyahu and others are “trying to explain them,” Roznai said in a podcast for UnXeptable, a group that opposes the massive judicial reforms Netanyahu sought before the war.
What will Israel’s case be?
Kittrie said Israel will be able to show it has instituted mitigation measures in its military campaign.
“Israel’s extensive advance warning and other measures to mitigate harm to Gaza civilians make clear that Israel’s goal is not to commit genocide but, far from it, to instead minimize Palestinian civilian casualties while lawfully exercising Israel’s rights to rescue its hostages, apprehend the Oct. 7 perpetrators, and ensure that Israel’s population is secure from further attacks,” he said.
Israeli spokespeople have also suggested that Israel will seek to turn the tables, and level charges of genocide against Hamas.
“The Hamas terrorist organization — which is committing war crimes, crimes against humanity and sought to commit genocide on 7 October — is responsible for the suffering of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by using them as human shields and stealing humanitarian aid from them,” the Foreign Ministry’s Hayat said in a statement.
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Egypt Rejects Israeli Opposition Leader’s ‘Egyptian Solution’ for Gaza
Yair Lapid, Israel’s opposition leader, presents his Gaza plan at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington, DC, Feb. 25, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
Egypt has rejected any responsibility for governing the Gaza Strip after the Israel-Hamas war, reiterating its opposition to a proposal by Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, who suggested Cairo take over reconstruction efforts.
“Cairo rejects any proposal to manage the Gaza Strip,” the Saudi television channel Al-Hadath quoted sources as saying. “Gaza will be managed by the Palestinians and in coordination with them. Cairo is committed to rebuilding Gaza without displacement.”
At an event hosted by the Washington, DC-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) think tank on Tuesday, former Israeli Prime Minister Lapid, who currently serves as the leader of the opposition in Israel’s parliament, presented “The Egyptian Solution” as his alternative plan for reconstruction efforts in Gaza after the war, proposing that Egypt take over administration of the enclave for 8-15 years in exchange for the cancellation of its $155 billion external debt.
“Egypt is a key strategic partner and [has been] a reliable ally for almost 50 years,” Lapid said. “A strong, moderate, pragmatic Sunni state, a crucial player in the region.”
According to the Egyptian state news agency MENA, Foreign Ministry spokesman Tamim Khalaf declared that any proposals contradicting Egypt and the Arab world’s established stance on Gaza are “rejected and unacceptable,” asserting that the territory must be under “full Palestinian sovereignty and management.”
Cairo has also previously rejected US President Donald Trump’s plan to “take over” the Gaza Strip to rebuild the war-torn enclave, while relocating Palestinians elsewhere during reconstruction efforts.
Trump called on Egypt, Jordan, and other Arab states to take in Palestinians from Gaza after nearly 16 months of war between Israel and Hamas.
Like many other Middle Eastern leaders who rejected Trump’s proposal, Egypt has advocated a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Lapid explained on Tuesday that his plan aims to strengthen Israel’s security in the south, which borders Gaza, by enabling reconstruction and administration without Hamas’s involvement, ultimately resulting in a complete “divorce” from Gaza.
“Down the road, 10 years from now, the best solution is for Israel to separate from the Palestinians in a way that contributes to Israel’s security,” he said.
Under Lapid’s plan, Egypt would be responsible for demilitarizing Gaza and stopping weapons smuggling during its control. In return, he proposed that the international community and regional allies pay off Egypt’s massive debt to support Gaza’s management and reconstruction.
“The situation whereby a terrorist organization controls a country or territory and leaves it for others to manage the civilian affairs – like Hezbollah in Lebanon – is unacceptable,” Lapid said.
He added that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the countries that normalized relations with Israel under the Abraham Accords could play a role in gradually integrating the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority into governing Gaza. “But that must be done in coordination with Israel and the United States, and with a constant focus on Israel’s security needs,” he emphasized.
Last week, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi met with leaders from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the UAE, and Qatar to discuss his country’s alternative to Trump’s plan and urged the global community to support rebuilding Gaza without displacing its residents.
During a press conference in Madrid alongside Spain’s prime minister, the Egyptian president reiterated that the international community must support reconstruction efforts without displacing Palestinians.
“We stressed the importance of the international community adopting a plan to reconstruct the Gaza strip without displacing Palestinians — I repeat, without displacing Palestinians from their lands,” he said.
On March 5, Egypt will host an emergency Arab summit to discuss what it described as “dangerous” developments for Palestinians, according to a statement from the Egyptian foreign ministry. The statement also said the summit was being called in response to a Palestinian request.
The post Egypt Rejects Israeli Opposition Leader’s ‘Egyptian Solution’ for Gaza first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Anti-Zionist Group Occupies Barnard College Building
Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) members occupying an administrative building on Feb. 26, 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The anti-Zionist group Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) has occupied the Milbank Hall administrative building at Barnard College in New York City to protest recent disciplinary sanctions imposed on student activists.
The highly anticipated action comes one day earlier than CUAD advertised on Monday, when it announced its intention to hold a demonstration on Thursday. In preparation for the event, which many feared would be disruptive of normal campus operations, college officials have spent the last several days tightening campus security — forbidding, for example, non-students from accessing campus, unmasking people who conceal their identities with masks or other garments, and performing random searches of “backpacks, purses, luggage,” and other effects.
Barnard College vice president of strategy Kelli Murray formally announced the measures, first reported by The Columbia Spectator, on Tuesday in an email to the campus community. However, by taking over Milbank Hall on Wednesday, when the college’s guard was down, CUAD has claimed an advantage in what could be a hotly contested struggle for control of the building.
Posting on Instagram during the late evening, CUAD said its members are “flooding the building despite Barnard shutting down campus. Barnard expelled two students and hundreds more rise up!”
Since then, a staff member has been assaulted, according to a source with knowledge of the situation.
CUAD’s demonstration gives expression to its fury over Barnard’s expelling two students who last month stormed Columbia professor Avi Shilon’s course on modern Israeli history and proceeded to distribute antisemitic literature and spew pro-Hamas propaganda.
This week, CUAD resorted to promoting antisemitic tropes to mobilize its supporters for the event, alleging that “Zionist billionaires” influenced the administration’s decision to expel the students.
“This is the first official expulsion of a Columbia affiliate over a protest against the ongoing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and occupation of Palestine by israel [sic],” CUAD said on Monday in an Instagram post. “Barnard’s decision to expel two students marks a serious escalation in the crackdown against students advocating for divestment from the israeli war machine…Barnard’s arbitrary timing and level of punishment is heavily influenced by external pressures from billionaires, donors, and government officials.”
Spinning conspiracies of Jewish control, it continued, “Numerous articles have exposed how billionaires have pressured Columbia administrators to suppress campus activism for Palestine. Zionist networks have specifically targeted the Palestine class disruption activists for harassment, doxxing, and school discipline as part of a coordinated wave of repression against Palestinian activism.”
Columbia University has struggled to contain CUAD — which just last month committed an act of infrastructural sabotage by flooding the toilets of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) with concrete — and plug the stream of negative publicity and scrutiny it draws. In September, during the university’s convocation ceremony, the group distributed a pamphlet which called on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s movement to destroy Israel. Several sections of the document were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose was to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
In April 2024, CUAD members commandeered a section of campus and, after declaring it a “liberated zone,” lit flares and chanted pro-Hamas and anti-American slogans. When the New York City Police Department (NYPD) arrived to disperse the unauthorized gathering, hundreds of CUAD members and their affiliates reportedly amassed around them to prevent the restoration of order. During the ensuing clashes with law enforcement, one student screamed “Yes, we’re all Hamas, pig!” while others shouted “Long live Hamas!” and filmed themselves praising the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of Hamas.
CUAD demonstrated again the challenge it poses to the university’s security apparatus when it attacked SIPA. Numerous reports indicate the action was the premeditated result of planning sessions which took place many months ago at an event held by Alpha Delta Phi (ADP) — a literary society, according to the Washington Free Beacon. During the event, the Free Beacon reported, ADP distributed literature dedicated to “aspiring revolutionaries” who wish to commit seditious acts. Additionally, a presentation was given in which complete instructions for the exact kind of attack which struck Columbia were shared with students. However, security officials were unable to amass any intelligence on the group’s plan before it unfolded.
Barnard College has said that it will not tolerate CUAD’s behavior, a statement it reinforced by suspending the protesters who invaded Professor Shilon’s class.
“Barnard will always take decisive action to protect our community as a place where learning thrives, individuals feel sage, and higher education is celebrated,” college president Laura Rosenbury said in a statement shared with The Algemeiner on Monday. “This means upholding the highest standards and acting when those standards are threatened.”
She continued, “When rules are broken, when there is no remorse, no reflection, and no willingness to change, we must act. Expulsion is always an extraordinary measure, but so too is our commitment to respect, inclusion, and the integrity of the academic experience. At Barnard we fiercely defend our values. At Barnard, we always reject harassment and discrimination in all forms. At Barnard, we always do what is right, not what is easy.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
The post Anti-Zionist Group Occupies Barnard College Building first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Australian Nurse Charged for Threatening Israeli Patients as Spy Chief Flags Antisemitism as Top Concern
Members of the Jewish community and supporters gather for a protest rally against rising antisemitism at Martin Place in Sydney, Jan. 21, 2025. Photo: AAP Image/Steven Saphore via Reuters Connect
An Australian nurse working at a hospital in Sydney has been charged with making threats after saying in comments caught on video that she would refuse to treat Israeli patients and instead kill them.
The latest legal step comes amid law enforcement’s scramble to combat a wave of antisemitic incidents in recent months that Australia’s spy chief has called his agency’s top priority.
On Tuesday night, 26-year-old Sarah Abu Lebdeh was arrested and charged with federal offenses, including threatening violence against a group and using a carriage service to threaten, menace, and harass, New South Wales (NSW) Police said in a statement. If convicted, she faces up to 22 years in prison.
The arrest follows an incident at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital in Sydney, in which Abu Lebdeh and her fellow nurse, Ahmed Rashid Nadir, were seen in an online video posing as doctors and making inflammatory statements during a night-shift discussion with Israeli influencer Max Veifer.
The footage, which circulated widely, showed Lebdeh stating she would refuse to treat an Israeli patient and instead kill them, while Nadir used a throat-slitting gesture and claimed to have already killed many.
“It’s Palestine’s country, not your country, you piece of s—t,” Lebdeh told Veifer.
“One day your time will come, and you will die the most disgusting death,” she added in a sentence riddled with obscenities.
After reviewing patient records, the hospital found no evidence that Lebdeh or Nadir had harmed patients.
NSW’s Health Minister Ryan Park confirmed that both nurses had been suspended and would be permanently barred from employment within the state’s health system.
According to the NSW Police statement, Lebdeh was released on bail and is set to appear in court on March 19. At this time, Nadir has not been charged.
The incident is the latest in a surge of antisemitic acts across Australia since the beginning of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza in October 2023, with Jewish institutions targeted in arson attacks and businesses defaced.
Law enforcement in Sydney and Melbourne, home to the majority of Australia’s Jewish population, is actively investigating hate crimes, including the recent discovery of a trailer containing explosives and a list of potential Jewish targets.
In a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, Mike Burgess, the director-general of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO), the country’s domestic intelligence agency, said that antisemitism is now the agency’s top priority.
“In terms of threats to life, [antisemitism is] my agency’s number one priority because of the weight of incidents we’re seeing play out in this country,” Burgess told the Senate. “Antisemitism and significant antisemitism acts are prominent in our investigation caseload at this point in time.”
In a recent 2025 threat assessment declassified by ASIO, Burgess warned that the surge in antisemitic attacks across Australia could escalate, as extremists are increasingly self-radicalizing and “choose their own adventure” toward potential terrorist activity.
“Threats transitioned from harassment and intimidation to specific targeting of Jewish communities, places of worship, and prominent figures,” he said. “I am concerned these attacks have not yet plateaued.”
After the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel, several Jewish sites in Australia have been relentlessly targeted with vandalism and even arson.
A recent report from the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ) found that antisemitism in Australia quadrupled to record levels following the outbreak of the Gaza war, with Australian Jews experiencing more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents between October 2023 and September 2024.
Burgess also described how narratives originally centered on “freeing Palestine” have expanded to include incitements to “kill the Jews.”
During the Senate hearing, Burgess praised the “strong law enforcement responses,” stating that the police “have done exceptionally well.” However, he also addressed criticism over delays in arrests and responses to antisemitic incidents, saying investigations take time and are necessary to fully grasp the problem.
The post Australian Nurse Charged for Threatening Israeli Patients as Spy Chief Flags Antisemitism as Top Concern first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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