The International Court of Justice

The International Court of Justice (the ICJ, often called the “World Court”) is the United Nations’ principal judicial organ, a bench of 15 judges sitting at the Peace Palace in The Hague that settles legal disputes between states and issues non-binding advisory opinions requested by UN bodies. It is not a criminal court and cannot try individuals; that is the separate International Criminal Court, a treaty body with no formal UN reporting line. Since 2004 the ICJ has become the principal legal venue through which a standing UN political majority has sought to brand Israel’s conduct unlawful, culminating in the genocide case brought by South Africa in December 2023, a case in which the Court has not found Israel guilty of genocide and has not ruled on the merits at all.

What it is

The ICJ was created by the UN Charter in June 1945 and began sitting in April 1946, inheriting the seat and much of the statute of the League of Nations’ old Permanent Court of International Justice. Its 15 judges are elected to nine-year terms by simultaneous votes of the UN General Assembly and Security Council, with no two judges permitted to share a nationality; seats have customarily gone to a judge from each of the five permanent Security Council members alongside regionally distributed others. The Court has two functions. In contentious cases it settles disputes between states that have consented to its jurisdiction, by treaty clause or special agreement, and its judgments are formally binding on the parties under Article 94 of the UN Charter, though enforcement runs through the Security Council, where a veto can and does block follow-through. In advisory proceedings, UN organs such as the General Assembly ask the Court a legal question and it answers with a non-binding opinion. The Court is funded through the UN’s regular assessed budget, not an independent endowment.

The Israel docket, case by case

The Court’s involvement with Israel runs through three matters, all originating from Arab and Islamic-bloc-led General Assembly action rather than from Israel or any state accepting bilateral jurisdiction over it. In 2003, during the Second Intifada’s suicide-bombing campaign, the General Assembly asked the Court to opine on Israel’s West Bank security barrier; the Court’s 9 July 2004 advisory opinion found the barrier’s route through occupied territory unlawful, a finding since repurposed by BDS campaigns as a general verdict against Israel’s existence rather than a route-specific finding. In December 2022 the General Assembly’s Fourth Committee voted 98 to 17, with 52 abstentions, to request a second advisory opinion on the legal status of the occupation itself, a request tracing to a 2007 UN Human Rights Council report by Special Rapporteur John Dugard first proposing the maneuver; the resulting 19 July 2024 opinion found Israel’s continued presence in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem unlawful and called for withdrawal “as rapidly as possible,” with Ugandan judge Julia Sebutinde dissenting from nearly every operative paragraph. Neither opinion binds Israel or any state; advisory opinions carry no enforcement mechanism.

The third and by far the highest-profile matter is a genuine contentious case: on 29 December 2023, South Africa filed suit against Israel under the Genocide Convention, which both states have ratified and which gives the Court jurisdiction over disputes between parties to it. This is the same treaty and the same court that ruled on Bosnia v. Serbia in 2007, so the venue and the legal standard are not Israel-specific.

What the genocide case actually says

The Court has issued a sequence of provisional-measures orders, not a verdict. On 26 January 2024, by a vote of roughly 15 to 2 (Sebutinde and Israel’s ad hoc judge Aharon Barak among the dissenters on most measures), the Court found that at least some of the rights South Africa asserted were plausible under the Genocide Convention, a low threshold used only to justify emergency interim measures, and ordered Israel to take steps to prevent genocidal acts, prevent and punish incitement, preserve evidence and allow humanitarian aid; it explicitly declined South Africa’s request to order a ceasefire. Further orders followed on 28 March and 24 May 2024, tightening the aid and Rafah-operations requirements. None of these orders is a finding that genocide occurred, is occurring, or was committed with genocidal intent; that determination would come only from a final merits judgment, which the Court has not reached and which international tribunals typically take years to produce. The claim that “the World Court found Israel guilty of genocide” is a plausibility-standard interim order dressed up as a verdict; see the full accounting of what has and has not been ruled and the broader genocide question.

How little the January order decided is spelled out inside the order itself, in the separate declaration of Judge Georg Nolte, the German judge who voted for the measures. Nolte reminded readers that “the Genocide Convention is not designed to regulate armed conflicts as such, even if they are conducted with an excessive use of force and result in mass casualties,” and wrote that South Africa’s evidence was “not comparable” to what the Court had before it in the Myanmar case: it was “not sufficient for South Africa to point to the terrible death and destruction” without engaging Israel’s stated purposes, destroying Hamas and freeing the hostages, and the “manifest circumstances” cutting the other way, the evacuation calls, the orders not to target civilians, and the delivery of humanitarian aid, all of which “make it at least plausible that its military operation is not being conducted with genocidal intent.” He supported interim measures anyway because certain statements by Israeli officials struck him as ambiguous enough to warrant caution, which is the honest shape of the order: a judge who voted yes on the measures while stating on the record that the military campaign itself did not plausibly show genocidal intent.

Is the Court just applying the law evenhandedly?

Defenders of the docket note that the ICJ is the same court that heard Bosnia’s genocide case against Serbia and Gambia’s genocide case against Myanmar over the Rohingya, that it applies one Genocide Convention text to every state party, and that it spends the overwhelming majority of its history on ordinary interstate disputes, maritime boundaries, treaty interpretations, diplomatic-immunity questions, that have nothing to do with Israel at all. That general caseload is genuinely evenhanded. The Israel-specific docket is not: the 98-17-52 vote that launched the 2024 advisory opinion shows it originates from an automatic UN political majority, not case-by-case legal necessity, and no comparable standing campaign has produced repeat advisory opinions targeting any other UN member state’s territorial conduct. Sebutinde’s near-total dissent in the 2024 opinion, and Barak’s dissents in the provisional-measures orders, are on the public record inside the Court’s own bench, not outside criticism. The Court’s ordinary work is fair; its Israel docket is manufactured by political volume, and the vote counts prove it.

The propaganda

The gap between “plausible” and “proven” is where most of the misuse lives: press coverage and activist messaging routinely drop the word “provisional” and report the January 2024 order as a genocide finding, and the 2004 and 2024 advisory opinions, both explicitly non-binding, are cited as though they were enforceable judgments equivalent to a criminal conviction. Conflating the ICJ with the ICC, a different institution with a different statute that indicts individuals rather than states, compounds the error in ordinary reporting and in activist rhetoric alike. The judge who voted for the emergency measures said on the record that Israel’s campaign was plausibly not genocidal; the activists citing his vote never quote that part.

Has Israel been found guilty of genocide in Gaza? · Is Israel committing genocide in Gaza? · The Genocide Convention, 1948 · The International Criminal Court · The UN Human Rights Council · Who attacked first on October 7