Israel's legal brief to the International Court of Justice rejecting South Africa's claims against it about committing genocide in Gaza has likely been postponed by the Iran war, The Jerusalem Post has learned.
The ICJ had given Israel several extensions over the last year to file the brief, with the most recent extension being until March 12.
However, no public announcement was made about the filing and the Post received indications that the war may have delayed the filing.
Despite the likely delay, Israel is still expected to file the brief in the near future, which was already nearly completed in February, on the eve of the war with the Islamic Republic.
The brief is expected to be one of the most momentous international law and war defense documents in its history, an approximately 1,000 page legal brief to the ICJ systematically dissecting South Africa's claims.
In addition to the main brief, which confronts the charges relating to the 2023-2024 period of the Gaza War, the document additionally includes a staggering 4,000 pages of exhibits, approximately.
South Africa has not yet given a detailed attack on the IDF's conduct in 2025.
It is expected that South Africa will file an update in Spring-Summer 2026 with additional charges relating to 2025, to which Israel will likely need to respond by Spring 2027.
There are top IDF officials who are even more concerned about the threat to Israel from the ICJ than they are from the International Criminal Court (ICC), according to IDF sources.
It is unknown how universal this view is among top Israeli officials, but it is not an isolated view and could be said to be reflected by huge amounts of time and energy which Israel poured into responding in time for the March 12 ICJ deadline, though in the end there seems to have been a last minute short-term postponement.
One reason that IDF sources believe the ICJ could be worse than the ICC is the charge itself of genocide versus individual war crimes.
If in the ICC, war crimes can be limited to an individual or to a limited series of events, while the ICJ can only issue a verdict of genocide if it decides that there is a systematic nationwide effort to perpetrate mass killing.
While genocide is much harder to prove than an individual war crime or small series of war crimes, if proven, IDF sources warn that the consequences of an ICJ genocide verdict for Israel's reputation, diplomatically and economically, could be much more severe and last decades.
Disorganized government messaging complicates ICJ genocide defense, IDF warns
In confronting the ICJ challenge, some non-legal IDF officials have warned that their job has not been made easier by the lack of organized, coherent, and systematic global messaging coming from the government.
Rather, IDF sources cautioned that the messaging coming from senior Israeli officials is often chaotic, and messages from some officials undermine significant hard work by the military to build trust and credibility worldwide.
While IDF sources would not name specific officials, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich have been lightning rods throughout their terms, with many democratic countries banning them from visiting.
Defense Minister Israel Katz has not been publicly banned, but has angered foreign countries, including officials in the Trump administration with some of his statements, and has generally had a less influential global profile than his predecessors.
Sometimes IDF officials would see a provocative statement from some Israeli political officials, and would then fatalistically go on with their work trying to improve Israel's reputation by improving the Palestinians' situation, knowing that the country would inevitably be hit with more anger in response to the statement.
The IDF has closed dozens of alleged war crimes cases arising from the 2023-2024 period of the war, the Jerusalem Post reported exclusively on February 8.
Publication of the details of the case closures has been extensively delayed by fears that the ICJ and ICC will abuse any new information put out for a politicized anti-Israel agenda.
Generally, much more progress has been made for the 2023-2024 period than more recent incidents which only occurred in 2025.
One specific focus of the ICJ proceedings has been and is expected to be a series of alleged strikes on Gazan bakeries in October-November 2023.
At the time, there were a series of IDF strikes which hit different Gazan bakeries, which are not only usually defined as civilian locations, but also were a major source of food for the wide public given the war situation.
Because of the ICJ secrecy rules, the IDF argues that it cannot yet publicize the specifics of its responses to the different incidents (though it could have decided to provide a paraphrase summary).
But overall, the responses are expected to argue that in some cases the bakeries had been taken over by Hamas, and in light of terrorist-fighters being located there, had become legitimate military targets.
In other cases, the bakeries may have not been the target and may not have even been hit directly by the IDF. But there may have been a misjudgment by the IDF about how far the after-impact of the strikes would spread, with unintended and indirect, but still deadly, impacts on the bakeries.
Even in that situation, Israel would argue before the ICJ that the unintended and tragic harm to the bakeries and those potential civilians inside, did not actually cause any kind of starvation in Gaza.
Prior to its October 7 invasion of Israel, Hamas had stocked up with food and supplies in Gaza in preparation for an expected Israeli counter-strike (though its preparations were for weeks or months and not two years).