The claim before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians is “atrocious and preposterous,” President Isaac Herzog told US Secretary of State Antony Blinken when the two men met in Tel Aviv yesterday.
“There’s nothing more atrocious and preposterous than this claim,” Herzog stated. “Our enemies, the Hamas, in their charter call for the destruction and annihilation of the State of Israel, the only nation-state of the Jewish people.”
Blinken and Herzog spoke in advance of Thursday’s ICJ hearing on a genocide claim against Israel filed by South Africa, which can be made because both countries are signatories to the 1948 Convention Against the Prevention of Genocide.
The convention “was enacted by the international community following the worst atrocities of humankind, the Shoah, the Holocaust, which was aimed specifically against the Jews, the Jewish people, to eliminate the Jewish race, the Jewish people,” Herzog told Blinken.
The ICJ hearing comes three months after the start of the Hamas war, sparked by the Hamas-led infiltration into southern Israel, in which over 1,200 people were massacred and some 240 were seized as hostages.
Herzog: we are in the right, we will proudly make our case
Hamas has asserted that over 23,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, but the Hamas-run Health Ministry does not distinguish between Hamas and civilian casualties. Therefore, Israel has claimed that over 8,000 of those fatalities are terrorist combatants.
At the ICJ, Herzog said, Israel “will present proudly our case of using self-defense under our most inherent right under international humanitarian law, where we are doing our utmost, under extremely complicated circumstances on the ground, to make sure that there will be no unintended consequences and no civilian casualties.
“We are alerting, we are calling, we are showing, we are sending leaflets, we are using all the means that international law enables us to move out people, so that we can unravel this huge city of terror underneath, in people’s homes, living rooms, bedrooms, mosques, and shops and schools.
“Yesterday we exposed a huge terrorist factory underneath a humanitarian corridor, which Israel is employing to help the civilians of Gaza,” Herzog told Blinken.
He lauded the support shown to Israel by the Secretary of State and US President Joe Biden, for standing “steadfast with Israel in this battle, which has to do clearly with humanity and with the values of the free world.”
Blinken arrived in Israel late Monday night after visiting Turkey, Greece, Jordan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.On Tuesday morning, a Foreign Ministry team, including staff from its public diplomacy and legal divisions, arrived at The Hague in advance of the hearing.Foreign Minister Israel Katz, who met with Blinken in the morning, spoke by phone about the case with his Hungarian counterpart, Peter Szijjártó, in advance of the latter’s visit to Israel next week.In a Facebook post after the conversation, Szijjarto said he supports Israel and condemned the legal attack against it at the ICJ.“Accusing a country suffering from terrorist attacks of genocide is nonsense. Hungary’s position is the same: We support Israel’s right to self-defense,” Szijjarto said.Hungary supports Israel’s military campaign to destroy Hamas, Szijiaro wrote, explaining, “We believe that it is in the interest of the whole world that the ongoing counterterrorism operations are successfully concluded, to prevent such a brutal terrorist attack ever again, anywhere in the world.“We talked about the innocent people held hostages. We agreed that Hamas should release all hostages as soon as possible. We will do everything jointly to ensure that the dual Israeli-Hungarian citizen who is still in captivity can regain his freedom as soon as possible,” he said.