A legal battle over whether Israel's war in Gaza amounts to genocide is set to open at the United Nations' top court with preliminary hearings into South Africa's call for judges to order an immediate suspension of Israel's military invasion.
Israel denies the genocide charge even as it has killed more than 23,000 Palestinians, mostly kids and women, wounded nearly 60,000, uprooted 85 percent of Gaza's 2.3 million population and flattened some 60 percent of the enclave's infrastructure.
The case that will begin on Thursday, which is likely to take years to resolve, strikes at the heart of Israel's national identity as a state created by the Zionists in the aftermath of the Nazi genocide in the Holocaust.
It also involves South Africa's identity: Its ruling African National Congress party has long compared Israel's policies in besieged Gaza and the occupied West Bank to its own history under the apartheid regime of white minority rule, which restricted most Blacks to "homelands" before ending in 1994.
Israel often considers UN and international tribunals unfair and biased. But it is sending a strong legal team to the International Court of Justice [ICJ] to defend its brutal onslaught in besieged Gaza.
In a statement after the case was filed, the Palestinian Authority's Foreign Ministry urged the court to "immediately take action to protect the Palestinian people and call on Israel, the occupying power, to halt its onslaught against the Palestinian people, in order to ensure an objective legal resolution."
Two days of preliminary hearings at the ICJ will begin with lawyers for South Africa explaining to judges why the country has accused Israel of "acts and omissions" that are "genocidal in character" in its war on besieged Gaza and has called for an immediate halt to Israel's assault.
Thursday's opening hearing is focused on South Africa's request for the court to impose binding interim orders, including that Israel halt its military invasion. A decision will likely take weeks.
The World Court, which rules on disputes between nations, has never adjudged a country to be responsible for genocide. The closest it came was in 2007 when it ruled that Serbia "violated the obligation to prevent genocide" in the July 1995 massacre by Bosnian Serb forces of more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys in the Bosnian enclave of Srebrenica.
