Middle East crisis live: ICJ to deliver interim genocide case ruling; CIA director reportedly to join hostage deal talks | Israel-Gaza war

Bethan McKernan

Israeli officials are bracing for an expected interim ruling from the international court of justice on South Africa’s allegation that the war in Gaza amounts to genocide against Palestinians, an emergency measure that could expose Israel to international sanctions.

The UN’s top court, which settles disputes between states, said on Wednesday that it would hand down its landmark ruling on Friday. The Hague-based body could order Israel to stop its three-month campaign in the Gaza Strip, sparked by the unprecedented attack by Hamas on 7 October. ICJ rulings are binding and cannot be appealed against, although the court has no power to enforce them.

South Africa filed a case against Israel before the court in December, alleging that the devastating offensive, which has killed 25,700 people, amounts to state-led genocide and stands in breach of the UN’s genocide convention, signed in 1948 as the world’s response to the Holocaust.

The full ruling is likely to take years, and the court is only looking at South Africa’s request for emergency measures to protect Palestinians from potential breaches of the convention on Friday. International legal experts believe an interim decision against Israel this week could serve as a pretext for sanctions.

Lawyers for South Africa alleged in their opening arguments in The Hague that Israel’s bombing campaign amounted to the “destruction of Palestinian life” and had pushed people to the brink of famine.

Israel has dismissed the allegations as “grossly distorted”, arguing it has a right to defend itself after the 7 October attack that killed 1,400 people, and that its offensive is targeting Hamas rather than the Palestinian people as a whole.

Read more here:

It’s 7:32am in Gaza and Tel Aviv and 6:32am in The Hague where the international court of justice is preparing to sit. Welcome to our latest Middle East crisis blog. I’m Reged Ahmad and I’ll be with you for the next while.

The international court of justice is preparing to deliver an interim ruling on South Africa’s allegation that the war in Gaza amounts to genocide against Palestinians, an emergency measure that could expose Israel to international sanctions. Israel has called South Africa’s allegations false and “grossly distorted,” and said it makes the utmost efforts to avoid civilian casualties in Gaza.

More on that in a moment but first, here’s a summary of the latest so far:

• The director of the CIA William Burns will meet with his Israeli and Egyptian counterparts plus the Qatari prime minister in Europe, according to US media reports. It’s in an effort to negotiate a fresh truce and hostage release in the Israel-Gaza war.

• The US and UK will impose new sanctions on leaders of the Iran-aligned Houthi group, which will include at least four senior figures being subject to asset freezes and travel bans, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday citing people familiar with the plan. Senior ministers in the Houthi administration in Yemen would also be sanctioned, with an announcement expected as early as Thursday.

• The targeting of ships linked to Israel will continue until aid reaches the Palestinian people in Gaza, Yemen’s Houthis leader Abdel-Malik al-Houthi said on Thursday in a televised speech. The group’s leader added that the results of the latest US and British escalation would be counterproductive and would not affect “our will and determination”.

• The US secretary of state Antony Blinken on Thursday renewed calls for Israel to protect civilians after a deadly strike on a UN shelter in Gaza that brought rare US condemnation. “We have reaffirmed this with the government of Israel and it is my understanding that they are, as is necessary and appropriate, looking into this incident,” Blinken said, without saying at what level discussions took place.

• Nasser hospital in Khan Younis has run out of food, anaesthetics and painkillers. “The health and humanitarian situation in the hospital is extremely catastrophic due to the siege by the Israeli occupation forces,” the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said.

• Israel’s far-right finance minister Bezalel Smotrich on Thursday accused Qatar, a key mediator in efforts to free its hostages, of being “largely responsible” for the 7 October Hamas attack. “One thing is clear: Qatar will not be involved one bit in what happens in Gaza the day after the war,” he said. His comments came after Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu was recorded allegedly telling hostages’ families this week that Qatar’s mediation was “problematic” when it came to resolving the hostage crisis.

• Qatar accused Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu of obstructing mediation efforts in the Gaza war and prioritising his career after a leaked recording allegedly captured him calling the Gulf state “problematic”. Qatar’s foreign ministry spokesperson, Majed al-Ansari, said “we are appalled by the alleged remarks”.

• Thomas White, the director of affairs in Gaza for the UN Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), said on Thursday that the situation in Khan Younis, southern Gaza ‘underscores a consistent failure’ to uphold international humanitarian law. He said the “persistent attacks on civilian sites” were “utterly unacceptable and must stop immediately”. White also said that an attack on UN Relief and Works Agency shelter in Gaza housing thousands of displaced people, had killed at least 12 people and injured 75 people, including 15 who were in a critical condition. White said a number of missions to reach the dead and injured were denied, without directly saying the attempts had been blocked by Israel. He said UN teams were only able to reach the site in the evening. Israel has denied responsibility for the attack, in which two tank shells hit an UNRWA training centre.

• People were seen fleeing near an aid distribution point in the Zeitoun district of Gaza City on Wednesday as gunfire was heard in the background. The video, shared on social media, showed crowds jostling and rushing, some with animal carts. Many people were seen carrying aid as they ran.

• Israel’s military says it is looking into allegations that its forces opened fire on crowds of Palestinians queueing for aid in northern Gaza City, reports Al Jazeera. At least 20 people were killed and 150 injured in the attack at the Kuwait roundabout, according to Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry. Ashraf al-Qudra, a spokesperson for the health ministry said a “massacre” had been carried out on “hungry mouths”. Victims were being treated at al-Shifa hospital, which is out of medical supplies and only has a few doctors working, Qudra said.

• Air raid alarms were sounded in Israel on Thursday, marking the first time in almost four days that projectiles were apparently launched from the Gaza Strip towards the country, reports the Times of Israel. Sirens were activated in the evacuated border community of Netiv Ha’asara, with no reports of injuries or damage.

• The Houthis in Yemen should be labelled as a terrorist group by the UK government, a top lawyer told parliament on Thursday. Independent crossbench peer Lord Pannick argued that the actions and ideology of the Iran-backed group warrant its so-called proscription. His comments came after the UK and US conducted their second round of joint strikes on Houthi targets this week after continued attacks on Red Sea shipping.

• Lord Cameron, the UK foreign secretary, who is in the Middle East for talks with Israeli leaders and Qatari mediators, has called for an end to the Israeli “bottlenecks” preventing aid reaching Gaza and backed an immediate pause in the fighting. Cameron also met the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, in the occupied West Bank, where he discussed his Gaza plan to “move from a pause – to get aid in and hostages out – towards a sustainable ceasefire, leading to a long-term political solution, including a Palestinian state”.

• António Guterres, the UN secretary general, said the humanitarian situation in Gaza is “appalling”, with a quarter of the population grappling with catastrophic levels of food insecurity, as he renewed the UN’s plea for an “immediate humanitarian ceasefire”. “Everyone in Gaza is hungry,” he said.

• Israeli strikes have killed at least 50 Palestinians in Khan Younis in the last 24 hours, says Ashraf al-Qidra, a spokesperson for the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry. Al Jazeera reported that at least three people including two children had been killed by Israeli shelling of the al-Satar al-Gharbi area of Khan Younis.

• The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, said the conflict in Gaza shows the UN and other world bodies have lost their effectiveness and called on Muslim countries and other nations to unite for a new “fair world order”. Reporting from Ankara on Wednesday, where Raisi met his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Al Jazeera journalist Sinem Köseoğlu said Raisi demanded the political and economic isolation of Israel, with the Iranian president saying “cutting the lifelines” would be an effective way of ending “Israel’s oppression and murders”.

• The Palestine Red Crescent Society transported a number of injured people to hospital on Thursday morning after Israeli forces targeted an apartment building in Rafah, southern Gaza. At least one person was killed in the strike, which happened at dawn in the Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood, reported Al Jazeera.

• The fatal shooting of American-Palestinian teenager, Tawfic Abdel Jabbar while driving a pickup truck in the occupied West Bank was unprovoked, the sole passenger has said, describing apparent Israeli fire hitting the back of the vehicle before it overturned several times on a dirt road.

• A 72-year-old Israeli woman held captive by Hamas militants for nearly 50 days has told an Israeli TV channel that she was held at length in a dark, humid tunnel where she met the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar.

• Violent clashes overnight were reported in the occupied West Bank as Israeli forces raided the city of Jenin. The local Palestinian militant group, the Jenin Brigades, said its men were engaged in heavy exchanges of fire with the Israeli military, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported, while Al Jazeera wrote that one Palestinian had been arrested. The Qatari broadcaster also cited the Palestinian Wafa news agency as reporting that Israeli forces had destroyed monuments to dead Palestinians and that city streets had been torn up by Israeli bulldozers.

• Thousands of Indians have flocked to a recruitment centre in India for jobs as construction workers in Israel, willing to take the risk of going to a country embroiled in a devastating war in Gaza.

• The number of antisemitic acts registered in Belgium rose sharply since the Hamas attack against Israel that triggered a war in Gaza, according to figures released on Thursday by Unia, an independent public body fighting discrimination. Unia that said it received 91 reports related to the Israel-Gaza conflict between 7 October and 7 December last year, compared with 57 reports for the whole of 2022.