Palestinian minister accuses Israel of ‘colonialism and apartheid’ at hearing

The Palestinian foreign minister, Riyad al-Maliki, has accused Israel of “colonialism and apartheid” at a world court hearing on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands since 1967.

“For over a century, the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self determination has been denied and violated,” Maliki told a bench of judges at the international court of justice (ICJ), the UN’s highest court, in The Hague. “Palestine was not a land without people. It was not, as Israeli leaders have described it, a wasteland. There was life on this land.”

He was presenting the Palestinian case at the start of a week of hearings called for by a UN general assembly vote in 2022.

Within the next few months the judges are expected to provide the assembly a non-binding assessment of how the Israeli policies of Jewish settlement and annexation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem “affect the legal status of the occupation” and its consequences for the rest of the world.

The hearings are separate from a case brought to the ICJ by South Africa in January under the Genocide Convention, calling for intervention to halt the continuing Israeli offensive in Gaza.

In that case, the court issued “provisional measures” on 26 January calling on Israel to rein in its military operations and ensure the provision of humanitarian relief to besieged Palestinians but the judges stopped short of ordering a ceasefire. The measures are binding under international law but have not made a noticeable difference to the way Israel has pursued its military campaign in Gaza.

In Monday’s hearing, Maliki illustrated his presentation with five maps, showed the dramatic erosion of Palestinian territory from the land established as Palestine under a League of Nations mandate in 1920.

The maps depicted the territory’s proposed partition under a failed 1947 UN plan, its reduction to the West Bank and Gaza after the 1948 war that led to the creation of Israel, and the fragments of Palestinian-run areas in the West Bank left by 2020, after decades of Jewish settlement.

Finally, Maliki showed a picture of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the UN general assembly last September, holding up a map he called the “new” Middle East in which all vestiges of Palestinian territory had been removed.

“There is no Palestine at all on this map, only Israel, comprised of all the land from Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” the Palestinian minister said. “This shows you what the prolonged, continuous Israeli occupation of Palestine is intended to accomplish – the complete disappearance of Palestine and the destruction of the Palestinian people.

“The Palestinians have endured colonialism and apartheid,” he said. “There are those who are enraged by these words. They should be enraged by the reality we are suffering.”

Israel denies that it is practising a form of apartheid, or that its offensive on Gaza, sparked by a Hamas attack from the coastal strip on southern Israel on 7 October, constitutes genocide.

An unprecedented 52 states are due to present arguments in this week’s hearings on the occupation, including the US and Russia. Israel has said it will not participate but it submitted a written argument in July last year, urging the ICJ to dismiss the request for an opinion.

Netanyahu’s office said in a statement that the conflict should be resolved through negotiations and that the case brought before the ICJ was “aimed at harming Israel’s rights to defend itself from existential threats”.

A foreign ministry spokesperson, Lior Haiat, in a post on the social media platform, X, claimed that the ICJ is being used as “a political tool to attack Israel harms both global trust in the international legal system and the chances of reaching a resolution of the conflict”.

Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s secretary general, said in a statement: “Israel’s occupation of Palestine is the longest and one of the most deadly military occupations in the world.

“Over the years, Israel’s military occupation has evolved into a perpetual occupation in flagrant violation of international law,” Callamard said. The world must recognise that ending Israel’s illegal occupation is a prerequisite to stopping the recurrent human rights violations in Israel and the [occupied] Palestinian territories.”

Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in a 1967 war and has since built settlements in the West Bank and steadily expanded them. Israeli leaders have long disputed that the territories are formally occupied on the basis that they were captured from Jordan and Egypt during a war rather than from a sovereign Palestine.

The United Nations has since 1967 referred to the territories as occupied by Israel and demanded that Israeli forces withdraw.