“No, South Africa, it is not we who have come to perpetrate genocide, it is Hamas,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the opening of his cabinet’s meeting on Sunday,
Last Friday, the South African government, under President Cyril Ramaphosa, accused Israel of genocide on Friday in the International Court of Justice.
Ramaphosa, who was behind police suppression of striking workers at the Lonmin platinum mine in the Bushveld that resulted in 34 miners dead and 78 injured, and was accused of several extramarital affairs, including in exchange for cash, who twice avoided impeachment over misuse of campaign funds and a questionable $4 million robbery, and who was accused of using his office to promote his businesses, compared Israel’s treatment of PA Arabs to apartheid, and recalled all his country’s diplomats from Israel.
Hamas, Netanyahu continued his response, “would murder all of us if it could. In contrast, the IDF is acting as morally as possible; it is doing everything to avoid harming civilians while Hamas is doing everything to harm them and is using them as human shields.
“I ask: Where were you, South Africa, and the rest of those who are preaching at us, when millions were murdered and uprooted from their homes in Syria, Yemen, and other areas? You were not there because everything you are doing now is only hot air, lies, and vanity. We will continue our defensive war, the justice and morality of which is without peer,” Netanyahu said.
“We give full backing to our forces,” the PM noted. “They are doing amazing work in a difficult war. Last week they eliminated over 100 terrorists; this happens almost daily. Dozens of terrorists are eliminated daily, sometimes even more than this. We see such spirit, we will eliminate Hamas, return our hostages, and win the war.”
The International Court of Justice in The Hague on Friday announced that “South Africa today filed an application instituting proceedings against Israel before the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, concerning alleged violations by Israel of its obligations under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (the ‘Genocide Convention’) in relation to Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
Israel is a signatory to the Genocide Convention.
According to the South African application, “acts and omissions by Israel . . . are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent . . . to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group” and that “the conduct of Israel — through its State organs, State agents, and other persons and entities acting on its instructions or under its direction, control or influence — about Palestinians in Gaza, violates its obligations under the Genocide Convention.”
Needless to say, there is no reference in the South African application nor in the court’s response to the October 7 massacre, including rape and beheading, of some 1,200 peaceful Israelis and the kidnapping of some 300.
Meanwhile, Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (CPPCG) definition of genocide fits Hamas’s crimes like a glove:
“Any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Nuff said.
