The ICJâs damning verdict (FT EB) Court ruling should prompt a rethink of the westâs policies towards Israel
If there was any lingering ambiguity about the illegality of Israelâs decades-long occupation of Palestinian territory, it should have been quashed by a landmark ruling from the worldâs top court. In a detailed 83-page advisory opinion released last week, the International Court of Justice probed Israelâs activities in Palestinian lands it has controlled since 1967. The result was damning.
The UN court found that virtually every Israeli action in the territory violated international law. The settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem that are home to some 700,000 Israeli Jews. The restrictions on the free movement of Palestinians. Their forced displacement and the demolitions of their homes. It concluded that Israelâs practices amount to annexation of large parts of the occupied territory, adding that they are designed to âcreate irreversible effects on the groundâ. Israelâs presence was âunlawfulâ and it was obliged to end it as ârapidly as possibleâ.
The opinion is non-binding, and it will not temper the behaviour of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuâs far-right government, which includes ultranationalist settlers who advocate annexing the West Bank. Indeed, settlement construction has accelerated under Netanyahuâs watch as he has boasted of thwarting Palestinian ambitions for statehood. Israel also has a history of ignoring UN resolutions and international court judgments critical of its actions, with the quiet acquiescence of its western allies.
But the findings of the ICJ â which is also hearing a separate case brought by South Africa alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza â are significant. They have put a microscope on the full extent of Israelâs illegal practices in the occupied territory at a time when the war triggered by Hamasâs horrific October 7 attack has put renewed focus on the need for a two-state solution. (...)
In the United States we would never dream of operating on anyone without consent, let alone a malnourished and barely conscious 9-year-old girl in septic shock. Nevertheless, when we saw Juri, thatâs exactly what we did.
We have no idea how Juri ended up in the Gaza European Hospital preoperative area. All we could see was that she had an external fixator â a scaffold of metal pins and rods â on her left leg and necrotic skin on her face and arms from the explosion that tore her little body to shreds. Just touching her blankets elicited shrieks of pain and terror. She was slowly dying, so we decided to take the risk of anesthetizing her without knowing exactly what we would find.
In the operating room, we examined Juri from head to toe. This beautiful, meek little girl was missing two inches of her left femur along with most of the muscle and skin on the back of her thigh. Both of her buttocks were flayed open, cutting so deeply through flesh that the lowest bones in her pelvis were exposed. As we swept our hands through this topography of cruelty, maggots fell in clumps onto the operating room table.
âJesus Christ,â Feroze muttered as we washed the larvae into a bucket, âsheâs just a fucking kid.â
The two of us are humanitarian surgeons. Together, in our combined 57 years of volunteering, weâve worked on more than 40 surgical missions in developing countries on four continents. Weâre used to working in disaster and war zones, of being on intimate terms with death and carnage and despair.
None of that prepared us for what we saw in Gaza this spring. (...)