Agencies
Johannesburg
While South African legal researchers were in an undisclosed location last week, racing against time to finalise hundreds of pages of evidence proving Israel’s intent to commit genocide in Gaza, in Israel, leaders gathering near the Gaza border were calling for the besieged and bombarded Strip to be emptied of Palestinians.
During the "preparing to settle Gaza” conference, held at a restricted military zone in Be’eri last Monday, Israeli Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was recorded calling for the "migration” of Gaza’s current inhabitants, and the possibility of future Israeli settlement expansion there – something considered illegal under international law.
"[We will] tell them, ‘we are giving you the chance, leave from here to other countries’,” Ben-Gvir said, while Israeli forces continued their more than yearlong bombardment of Gaza. "The Land of Israel is ours.”
South African diplomats assert that statements like these offer undeniable evidence of Israel’s genocidal intent – something they must prove before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in an ongoing case.
Monday (October 28) was the deadline for South Africa to submit a detailed memorial against Israel to the ICJ, lawyers and diplomats told Al Jazeera. Its legal submission aims to definitively establish that Israel’s military actions in Gaza amount to genocide.
Despite new evidence emerging daily, senior South African officials instructed the legal team to stick to what they had already collected to meet the approaching deadline.
The legal team is however confident that the hundreds of pages of evidence are more than enough to sustain their case.
"The problem we have is that we have too much evidence,” Ambassador Vusimuzi Madonsela, South Africa’s representative to The Hague, explained to Al Jazeera.
Zane Dangor, the director-general of South Africa’s Department of International Relations and Cooperation, said: "The legal team will always say we need more time, there’s more facts coming. But we have to say you have to stop now. You [have] got to focus on what you have.”
The 500-page South African legal submission aims to expose a pattern of mass casualties in Gaza, where almost 43,000 Palestinians have been killed since October 2023, which South African officials argue exceeds any proportional military response to Hamas’s attacks on October 7 last year.
South Africa has maintained since its interim application in December last year that Israel’s intent goes beyond military objectives, aiming instead at the wholesale depopulation of Gaza through extreme violence and forced displacement.
In its initial application, South Africa submitted 84 pages pleading with the court to find Israel guilty of suspected genocide and order it to, among other things, halt its invasion in Gaza.
During oral arguments in The Hague, the South African legal team relied on statements made by Israeli politicians at the time, video clips of the destruction in Gaza and maps that showed how Palestinian land had been encroached on.
The ICJ set firm its Monday deadline for South Africa to prove, on paper, that Israel is guilty of genocide.
However, this is a feat described by international law experts as "nearly unprovable”.
Professor of international law at the University of Cape Town, Cathleen Powell, said South Africa’s challenge is to prove genocidal intent on behalf of the state of Israel and to show a link between comments made by officials and the programmatic nature of the destruction of Gaza.