Hamas is sacrificing its own people in order to embarrass Israel
The judicial charade taking place before the International Court of Justice is meant to embarrass Israel, there is no other purpose. The court could “order” Israel to stop its offensive in Gaza but has no way of enforcing it.
Israel, rightly, would just ignore any such ruling. Because when you are fighting for your existence against an enemy that has vowed to exterminate you — to actually commit genocide — then being embarrassed on the world stage is the least of your worries.
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Lawyers for South Africa, which has brought the case before the court, on Thursday alleged crimes committed by Israel against the people of Gaza were “unprecedented and unparalleled.”
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres used the same phrase in November.
Have we lost our collective minds? Or at least our collective memories?
Germany’s genocide which killed six million Jews was unprecedented and unparalleled.
Or, if we want to put unprecedented and unparalleled in terms of death and destruction in the shortest space of time, what about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945 (probably upwards of 110,000 dead).
What if South Africa turned its moralizing eyes north of Israel to Syria?
According to figures released by the UN last year, by 2022 about 307,000 civilians had been killed in president Bashar Assad’s decade-long crackdown against his own people, including 15,272 who died due to torture. Then there’s the 154,817 people who just “disappeared” and the 14 million people who have been displaced.
Of course, Assad is taking a leaf out of his father’s book, Hafez al-Assad who, as president, was responsible for the deaths of between 20,000-40,000 people in Hama in just three weeks in 1982.
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In Gaza, about 23,000 people may have been killed in three months, although the figures from the Hamas run health ministry are notoriously unreliable. More than 8,500 Hamas terrorists have been killed, according to the Israel Defence Forces.
Terrible as the death toll is, it is hardly unprecedented or unparalleled.
But what is happening before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) is a political persecution by South Africa. At the very beginning of its application before the court, South Africa characterized Israel’s conduct against Palestinians as being part of its “75-year-long apartheid.”
If anyone knows about apartheid, it’s South Africa. Accusing others of carrying out an evil regime that was once the defining characteristic of your own country is one way to atone for the sins of the past.
After reading South Africa’s 84 page application, Joanna Baron, executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, said it was “exceedingly one-sided.”
“It’s not at all a fair or balanced or nuanced accounting of the conflict. It doesn’t include any of the peace offers that were rejected by Palestinians, doesn’t go into the trauma that the Israeli collective psyche suffered after something like the second intifada,” she said.
Meanwhile, Adila Hassim, a lawyer for South Africa, told the ICJ, “Nothing will stop the suffering, except an order from this court.”
But this again highlights what a farce the Hague hearing is. The ability to stop the human suffering, the mounting death toll and the destruction of property lies in the hands of Hamas, the murderous cult that carried out the heinous Oct. 7 attacks, that started all this mayhem and is the de facto government of Gaza.
What does Hamas need to do? Release the hostages.
Israel says 132 hostages are still being held in Gaza although 25 of them are believed to have died. How is unknown.
If Hamas were to release the hostages the pressure on Israel, particularly from the United States, its strongest ally, would be so great that it would be forced to stop its attack on Gaza.
And yet what is Hamas’s response to the death of its people? This week it taunted Israel and the world by releasing photos of four Israeli women kidnapped on Oct. 7 and who are still held hostage. The blood-splattered, shell-shocked faces of Liri Albag, Karina Ariev, Daniela Gilboa and Agam Berger testify to Hamas’s inhumanity.
Any organization that wanted peace, or to stop the suffering of its people, wouldn’t parade the photos of these brutalized women as if they were trophies.
It’s almost as if Hamas wanted the attacks to continue, to keeping gathering support, delighting in the protests on streets throughout the world. For Hamas the death of its people is their best propaganda weapon. For Hamas, the death of innocent Palestinian men, women and children for the “cause” is a tactic.
It’s not as if the terrorists hide their malevolent way of thinking, Hamas official Ghazi Hamad is proud of it.
After Oct. 7, Hamad said, Hamas was willing to “pay a price.” What he meant was the people of Gaza would pay the price.
“We are called a nation of martyrs and are proud to sacrifice martyrs,” Hamad said.
And so where is the prosecution of Hamas for any number of war crimes — the butchery of Oct. 7, the mass rape of women, the kidnapping of civilians, the parading of hostages? What about their responsibility for the deaths of their own people?
If the judges at the ICJ really are concerned with justice then they should treat South Africa’s application with the contempt it deserves and dismiss it entirely.
National Post
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