Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories is illegitimate, UN courtroom guidelines

Israel’s 57-year-old occupation of East Jerusalem and the West Financial institution is illegitimate beneath worldwide legislation, the UN’s highest courtroom mentioned, casting the Jewish state’s conduct in the direction of Palestinians residing beneath its army’s management as a decades-long violation of their rights.

In a collection of findings on Friday, the ICJ dominated that nearly each side of Israeli coverage within the West Financial institution was unlawful, from the creation and help of sprawling settlements to the appliance of discriminatory legal guidelines and of Israeli sovereignty over East Jerusalem.

“Israel’s continued presence within the occupied territories is illegal,” mentioned the opinion backed by a majority of judges on the Worldwide Courtroom of Justice. “It must be delivered to an finish as quickly as doable.”

The ruling, in response to a 2022 request by the UN Basic Meeting, discovered that not one of the authorized structure of Israel’s occupation complied with worldwide humanitarian legislation, in a damning — if toothless — indictment of how Israel has interpreted its obligations in the direction of the Palestinians beneath the Geneva Conventions.

Whereas dealing a diplomatic blow to Israel, the advisory opinion to the UN Basic Meeting can have little rapid impression provided that the ruling is non-binding. Israel is already ignoring one from 2004 that declared its separation barrier — which took swaths of the West Financial institution into Israeli territory — to be unlawful.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, mentioned on X: “The Jewish persons are not occupiers in their very own land — neither in our everlasting capital Jerusalem nor within the land of our ancestors in Judea and Samaria.

“No false choice in The Hague will distort this historic fact, and likewise the legality of Israeli settlement in all of the territories of our homeland can’t be disputed.”

The West Financial institution of the Jordan river is called Judea and Samaria by Israelis, a reference to its biblical identify.

Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, a champion of its settlements coverage within the West Financial institution, mentioned on X that the perfect response to the ICJ could be to annex the whole territory. “The reply to The Hague — sovereignty now,” he wrote.

Israel didn’t totally symbolize itself on the hearings. Its ambassador to the Netherlands, the place the hearings came about in The Hague, wrote final 12 months that the nation declined to reply questions that “mirrored a extreme injustice and imbalance”.

The Palestinian Authority, which has restricted self rule in components of the West Financial institution, welcomed the ruling as “well timed and sorely wanted”.

“The Palestinian individuals have endured insufferable struggling and injustice for many years,” mentioned the PA’s ministry of overseas affairs. “Israel’s colonial, expansionist, and genocidal insurance policies are on full, horrific show earlier than the world.”

All parts of the ICJ’s findings had been backed by a majority of the courtroom’s 15 judges, although the precise quantity different for various rulings.

The advisory opinion, requested earlier than the struggle between Israel and Hamas started on October 7, is considered one of three separate worldwide authorized challenges that Israel is preventing.

South Africa has alleged in a distinct case, additionally earlier than the ICJ, that Israel is engaged in a genocide in Gaza, the place practically 40,000 Palestinians have been killed, in accordance with officers within the strip.

Individually, prosecutors on the Worldwide Felony Courtroom have requested arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his defence minister over the struggle in Gaza, together with on allegations of utilizing hunger as a weapon of struggle and “deliberately directing assaults towards a civilian inhabitants”.

Taken collectively, the three authorized actions symbolize the gravest current problem to Israel’s declare that its army acts inside the restraints of the legal guidelines of struggle, and that its long-running occupation of the Palestinian territories is justified by safety issues.

The ICJ rejected the thrust of these arguments, saying that “the sustained abuse by Israel of its place as an occupying energy . . . violates elementary rules of worldwide legislation and renders Israel’s presence within the Occupied Palestinian Territory illegal.”

Israel occupied the West Financial institution, together with East Jerusalem, after wresting management of the territories from Jordan within the 1967 struggle. It later annexed East Jerusalem, in a transfer rejected by the worldwide group, and has since constructed greater than 100 settlements within the West Financial institution and confiscated tens of hundreds of acres of land.

The Jewish inhabitants of the realm now exceeds 700,000, residing in walled-off settlements nestled inside and close to a Palestinian inhabitants of about 3mn.

The courtroom mentioned that this switch of Israeli residents into the occupied Palestinian territories and Israel’s monetary and army help of the settlements was additionally inconsistent with worldwide legislation and the Geneva Conventions.

Lately, Israeli and worldwide human rights teams say that the Israeli army’s administration of the West Financial institution has crossed the brink into apartheid, together with with the operation of separate courts for Israelis and Palestinians, who’re tried beneath army legislation with a conviction fee of greater than 99 per cent, and the imposition of a residence allow system and segregated roads for Palestinians solely.

The courtroom mentioned these insurance policies had been in breach of a world settlement towards racial segregation and apartheid, referred to as the Conference on the Elimination of All Types of Racial Discrimination.