By Sadaf Sundas Riaz
The top U.N. court has ordered Israel to stop its Rafah military operation
Islamabad News Desk (SCN) — The United Nations’ highest court ordered Israel Friday to halt its offensive in Rafah, citing “immense risk” to the population of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who have sought refuge in the southern Gaza city. But the court did not call for an end to Israel’s wider offensive across the Gaza Strip.
Friday’s decision marked the third time this year that the 15-judge panel has issued preliminary orders to rein in the death toll and create pathways for more humanitarian aid in Gaza.
The court called on Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
In response to the court’s ruling, an Israeli government statement said the country intended to press on with its offensive in Rafah — in a way that would abide by Israel’s interpretation of the ruling.
“Israel has not carried out and will not carry out military activity in the Rafah area that creates living conditions that could lead to the destruction of the Palestinian civilian population, in whole or in part,” the Israeli government statement said.
Yuval Shany, an international law expert at the Hebrew University and senior fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, says the court’s ruling left enough ambiguity to allow Israel to continue its offensive there.
Reading out the court’s ruling from the bench of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Court President Nawaf Salam noted that provisional measures ordered by the court earlier this year have not fully addressed the situation in Gaza and that conditions, particularly in Rafah, have deteriorated further.
Salam cited a report by the United Nations International Children’s Fund that estimated about half of 1.2 million Palestinians sheltering in Rafah were children, and he warned that “military operations there would result in, I quote, the few remaining basic services and infrastructure they need to survive being totally destroyed.”
In addition to ordering Israel’s military to immediately cease its operations in Rafah, the court ordered Israel to keep the Rafah border crossing into Egypt open for humanitarian aid, as well as ordering Israel to allow the U.N.'s investigative bodies access to Gaza so they can finish a fact-finding mission to collect evidence for the broader case brought by South Africa accusing Israel of genocide. Lastly, the court ordered Israel to submit a report within a month detailing the measures it has taken to fulfill the court’s orders