UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, International Criminal Court Prosecutor, International Court of Justice President: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Indigenous Palestinian People.
Through various legal interventions including in Germany and the Netherlands, we have exposed that while European courts may acknowledge these obligations under international law in principle, they are unwilling to enforce them. The Dutch Court of Appeal has even confirmed there was a serious risk of genocide taking place in Gaza, while stopping short of enforcing the clear obligations resulting from such a determination.
In many jurisdictions, such as France, the United Kingdom, and Germany, lawsuits seeking to ban or review arms export decisions are dismissed on procedural grounds. The courts often accept the bureaucratic excuses and regulatory tightropes of European governments – effectively permitting complicity in genocide and war crimes.
On 13 January 2026, Al-Haq, Union Juive Française pour la Paix (UJFP), NIDAL, Avocats pour la Justice au Proche-Orient (AJPO), Survie, Droits et Mouvements Sociaux (Rights and Social Movements) and Guerre à la Guerre (War on War), filed an appeal with the administrative judge at the French Administrative Court, Consei d’État for abuse of power against the decision of the President of France, Emmanuel Macron to permit an arms fair in Paris held in November 2025, featuring Israeli arms companies, Israeli delegations, and companies that supply arms to Israel.
Although Israel continues to destroy the Palestinian people though bombings, forced displacement, and the systematic destruction of their living conditions ––facts characterised as genocide,–– and while competent international bodies have recognised this characterisation and called for the cessation of arms transfers to Israel, the French government instead made a clear political choice to host the Milipol trade show, held near Paris in November 2025.
Despite our formal notice asking the French authorities to ban several companies, despite domestic and international law prohibiting the maintenance of genocide, the President of France instead publicly upheld the decision to maintain the presence of 30 Israeli arms companies, companies of other nationalities involved in supplying arms to Israel, and permitted the Israeli delegation to attend the Milipol trade fair. In response to this decision, our organisations have filed an appeal with the administrative judge for abuse of power.
Despite the horrors of the last two years and the ICJ’s clear jurisprudence, the Council has chosen not to ground its response in the very body of law it is obliged to uphold: international human rights law, including the right of self-determination, the law governing the use of force, international humanitarian law, and the UN Charter.”
… Albanese stressed that Resolution 2803 replaces clear legal obligations towards Palestinians with a “security-first, capital-driven model of foreign control” that entrenches existing power asymmetries.
… “A military force answering to a so-called ‘Board of Peace’ chaired by the President of the United States, an active party to this conflict that has continually provided military, economic and diplomatic support to the illegal occupying Power, is not legal,” the expert said. “It is a brazen attempt to impose, by threat of continued force against a virtually defenceless population, US and Israeli interests, plain and simple.”
“Essentially, it will leave Palestine in the hands of a puppet administration, assigning the United States, which shares complicity in the genocide, as the new manager of the open-air prison that Israel has already established.”
The ongoing genocide in Gaza is a collective crime, sustained by the complicity of influential Third States that have enabled longstanding systemic violations of international law by Israel. Framed by colonial narratives that dehumanize the Palestinians, this livestreamed atrocity has been facilitated through Third States’ direct support, material aid, diplomatic protection and, in some cases, active participation. It has exposed an unprecedented chasm between peoples and their governments, betraying the trust on which global peace and security rest. The world now stands on a knife-edge between the collapse of the international rule of law and hope for renewal. Renewal is only possible if complicity is confronted, responsibilities are met and justice is upheld.
Edan Alexander, the American Israeli soldier who was held captive by Hamas for a year and a half, “grew up in New Jersey and moved to Israel after high school to join the military”, as reported by the New York Times. When I read that line I wondered what drove his radicalization – what leads an American teenager to travel to a foreign country to join an army whose primary occupation is apartheid?
The question is meaningful in its particulars, but it also highlights a broader phenomenon: Alexander’s path is not remotely unique. The Washington Post reported in February 2024 that “an estimated 23,380 American citizens currently serve in Israeli ranks”. But they have traveled a trail worn and bloodied by others. Baruch Goldstein, an American Zionist who murdered 29 Palestinians in a mosque in Hebron in 1994, was from Brooklyn.
The Post story, which profiles the families of Americans who died serving in the Israeli army, describes their “fierce commitment to the Jewish state”. Two of the three families have lived or volunteered in settlements – the apartheid infrastructure Israel has built in the West Bank. One mother describes her son, who died while perpetrating a genocide in Gaza, as “more Israeli than the Israelis”. A father describes his family’s journey from America by saying: “We came for Zionism.”
“In just one week—between 20 and 26 April—Israel killed 345 Palestinians and injured 770 others, according to field data indicating that at least 94% of the victims were civilians. Children (51%), women (16%), and the elderly (8%) together accounted for 75% of those killed.
… Over the past few weeks, Euro-Med Monitor’s field team has documented repeated instances of entire families being wiped out, as well as the deliberate targeting of specific families in a pattern suggesting a clear intent to annihilate them. The Israeli government’s continued fostering of false narratives, alongside the escalation of these crimes, reaffirms its systematic policy of covering up violations and protecting perpetrators. Israel and its allies are operating within a framework of complete impunity aimed at undermining justice, and are inadvertently revealing to the world the biased foundations of international law.
All states, individually and collectively, must fulfil their legal responsibilities by taking urgent action to stop the genocide in the Gaza Strip, through implementing effective measures to protect Palestinian civilians, ensuring Israel’s compliance with international law and the decisions of the International Court of Justice; and holding Israel accountable for its crimes against the Palestinians. The International Criminal Court must reissuearrest warrants for the Israeli Prime Minister and Minister of Defence at the earliest opportunity, in accordance with the principle that there is no immunity for international crimes.
The international community must also impose economic, diplomatic, and military sanctions on Israel for its systematic and grave violations of international law. These sanctions should include an arms embargo; an end to all political, financial, and military support; freezing the assets of officials involved in crimes against Palestinians; imposing travel bans; and suspending trade privileges and bilateral agreements that provide Israel with economic benefits that enable its continued crimes.”
Many of us, here in this room, were in The Hague the last time, almost exactly one year ago, when South Africa brought its historic Genocide Convention case against the state of Israel for its acts in Gaza. We had already watched Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the defense minister, Yoav Gallant, declare exactly what they intended to do in the Gaza Strip, repeatedly calling for its extermination. We had watched Israeli troops record themselves committing heinous crimes only for popular consumption, and we had also watched Western Nations cheer them on with brazen, brazen contempt. We watched the Israeli regime lie, denying the killings that were being live streamed to our phones and to our televisions.
And yet we thought and believed that within the world’s highest court, within the International Court of Justice, that these lies would not hold up. And they didn’t, as determined by thek provisional orders of the Court, deeming Israel’s actions genocidal. But immediately after the hearing, Then president of the United States, Joe Biden, issued a 335-word statement- many of you perhaps remember it- to mark the 100 days since October 7th. The words ‘Palestine’ and ‘Palestinians’ were absent and nowhere to be found in these 300 words.
Immediately after the hearings at the International Court of Justice, Prime Minister Nethanihu called for an emergency press conference. He came on to the television and declared “Nobody can stop us. Not even The Hague.” And that threat has only compounded since January of 2024, all the way until we meet now, in January of 2025.
For nearly 500 days, we’ve witnessed systematic violations of international law and international norms, in Gaza and in the region, but enabled by powerful nations, providing the diplomatic cover, military support, and political support for these actions. And that complicity isn’t just about Palestine alone. That complicity- that lethal complicity- has dealt a devastating blow to the very integrity of the United Nations Charter and its foundational principles, to the institutions of global governance, with the sanctions against the International Criminal Court, or the dismissal of the orders of the international court of justice by the countries in the West.
So for me the selection of countries seated at this table here today is no accident. The assault against the Palestinian people echoes for most of us, especially coming from the Global South, it echoes dark chapters of our own history. And these struggles remind us that Injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere. So we may hail from different continents but we share the conviction that complacency is complicity, in such crimes.
No what is the he group? Why another group? What makes it different? This is a group for collective action. Collective action at the national level, collective action at the international level, and collective action at the multilateral level. Because we live in an interconnected world and, as we’ve seen clearly with Israel’s actions in Gaza, the mechanisms of injustice are found in the fabric of Global Supply chains. We know that advanced weaponry cannot be built without technology, without materials, without components, from factories that span across continents. We know that they can’t be shipped to be used against the Palestinian people without using ports and logistics networks that are on each of our own soils and each of our own territories. So by coordinating the commitments that many of these nations have already championed- across our ports, across our factories, across our courts- The Hague Group aims to build a bullwark to defend international law.
Just as the International Community once united to dismantl apartheid in South Africa, through similarly coordinated legal and diplomatic pressure, we must now unite to enforce international law and protect the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination. The alternative would be, it’s clear to all of us, is extremely stark. The alternative would be surrender to a world where might alone determines whether laws matter and when they can be violated at will. So, for that, I want to thank the members of The Hague Group, in this inaugural moment, for standing as a defense of humanity and the conscience of the world.
