The Guardian/ Haroon Siddique and Lorenzo Tondo in Jerusalem/25.5.2024
As expected Israel will simply ignore International Law – Mark
ICJ president says humanitarian situation in Gaza’s southernmost city is now classified as ‘disastrous’
ICJ ruling underlines risks for Israel as its isolation grows
The UN’s top court has ordered Israel to halt its assault on the southern Gaza city of Rafah in a ruling that will ratchet up the pressure on the increasingly isolated country.
The president of the international court of justice, Nawaf Salam, said the humanitarian situation in Rafah had deteriorated further and was now classified as “disastrous”, meaning the ICJ’s previously issued provisional measures were insufficient.
He said the court had voted by a majority of 13 votes to two that “Israel shall, in conformity with its obligations under the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, and in view of the worsening conditions of life faced by civilians in Rafah governorate … immediately halt its military offensive and any other action in the Rafah governorate which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that would bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.
The order by the ICJ is not enforceable, and Israeli ministers indicated that they would not comply with it.
A man sits and three young children stand looking out of a bare concrete room on the first floor of a block of flats that has had the whole front wall blasted off. Washing hangs over the surrounding rubble
A Palestinian man and his children sit in a destroyed room after an Israeli airstrike hit a residential building in Rafah on Wednesday. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images
Israeli forces stepped up military strikes on Gaza, bombing targets in Rafah, even as the ICJ delivered its decision, residents and medics said.
Friday’s ruling by the ICJ is the court’s third – and by far the most significant – intervention in the conflict and comes four days after the chief prosecutor of the international criminal court, a separate court also based in The Hague, said he was seeking arrest warrants for senior Hamas and Israeli officials for war crimes and crimes against humanity, including the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his defence minister, Yoav Gallant.
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www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/24/icj-orders-israel-to-halt-rafah-offensive-new-ruling
