CAPE TOWN, South Africa — South African President Cyril Ramaphosa says Israel’s alleged crimes against Palestinians in Gaza have been “laid bare” in the International Court of Justice’s ruling.
Ramaphosa also said his country, which lodged the genocide case against Israel at the top U.N. court, is happy that “the Palestinian people’s cries for justice have been heeded by an eminent organ of the United Nations.”
The court ruled in a preliminary order that Israel must do all it can to prevent deaths, destruction and any acts of genocide in its offensive in Gaza, but did not order a cease-fire by Israel, which South Africa had pushed for.
Ramaphosa, in a live television address in South Africa hours after the ruling, accused Israel of meting out “collective punishment” against Palestinians in Gaza in response to the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas militants. The South African leader said Israel’s military offensive was “vastly disproportionate to any claim by Israel that it has been acting in self-defense.”
He also explained why South Africa brought the case to the world court, comparing Israel’s actions in Gaza to South Africa’s own history of apartheid under the previous system of white minority rule that forced most Black South Africans to live in “homelands” and denied them the right of freedom of movement among many other oppressive policies.
Leading rights groups in Israel and abroad and Palestinians have accused Israel and its 56-year occupation of the West Bank of morphing into an apartheid system that they say gives Palestinians second-class status and is designed to maintain Jewish hegemony from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.
“Some have told us that we should mind our own business and not get involved in the affairs of other countries,” Ramaphosa said. “Others have said it is not our place. And yet it is very much our place as a people who know too well the pain of dispossession, discrimination, state-sponsored violence.”
“We are also a people who were victims of the crime of apartheid,” he said. “We know what apartheid looks like.”
