The dizzying malevolence of two days in The Hague
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For over three and a half hours on Thursday, the members of the South African legal team provided grisly details of the destruction wrought in Gaza during the current war, sparked by Hamas’s barbaric assault on Israel on October 7. But mention of that infamous day was almost entirely absent from the tale the South Africans told, an unsettling oversight that only got worse as the hearing proceeded. Even more astonishing was the manner in which South Africa’s attorneys entirely failed to mention the way in which Hamas has cynically and deliberately placed Gaza’s own citizens, men and women, children and elderly, in harm’s way.
Dr. Adila Hassim for South Africa specifically referred during her oral arguments to the damage done to Gaza’s medical infrastructure, as part of Israel’s allegedly genocidal effort against the Palestinians in the territory. But incredibly, not even once did she allude to the documented manner in which Hamas has comprehensively exploited Gaza’s medical facilities as cover for its military operations, whether tunnels dug under hospitals, ambulances used to transport terrorists, or hospitals used to hold hostages.
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But worse was to come when the eminent British barrister Vaughan Lowe took to the podium to outline the provisional measures South Africa has asked the court to order against Israel. Lowe, a king’s counsel and professor of international law at Oxford University, no less, declared that Israel did not even have the right to self-defense in its actions in Gaza, since, he argued, Israel controls the access points into and out of the territory. “Its actions are enforcing its occupation,” claimed Lowe, eradicating from history in one fell swoop Hamas’s atrocities of October 7, its ongoing rocket attacks against Israeli population centers, and its violations of the laws of armed conflict.
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Addressing the court on Friday, legal adviser to the Israeli Foreign Ministry Dr. Tal Becker pointed out that Lowe has expressed a very different legal opinion in the past. “The right of self-defense is a right to use force to avert an attack,” Lowe wrote in a study published by the Chatham House think tank in 2005. “The source of the attack, whether a state or a non-state actor, is irrelevant to the existence of the right… Force may be used to avert a threat because no one, and no state, is obliged by law passively to suffer the delivery of an attack,” he argued then, as quoted by Becker. And yet, before the 17 judges in The Hague, Lowe had essentially asserted that one state is “obliged by law passively to suffer the delivery of an attack”: Israel.
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https://www.timesofisrael.com/the-dizzying-malevolence-of-two-days-in-the-hague/
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