Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The International Court of Justice, established by the UN to adjudicate issues among nations, issued an advisory opinion on Wednesday branding the Israeli blockade on food and medical aid into the occupied Gaza Strip illegal.
I mean, surely this conclusion is simple common sense. You can’t starve people. That’s not only illegal, that is the height of immorality and cruelty. The war criminals who head up the Israeli government hold that they can do whatever they want to people on the grounds that they are Palestinians, or that millions are terrorists, or that there are no innocents among certain populations. No one with a heart and a mind agrees with them. Unfortunately, there are lots of heartless mindless people in the world, some of them extremely powerful.
In a world where International Humanitarian Law is increasingly brazenly flouted, as a way of undermining it and ensuring that its violators retain impunity, the Court upheld the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 on occupied populations, as well as the International Covenant on Economic, Cultural and Social Rights of 16 December 1966 (hereinafter the “ICESCR”), a UN instrument that Israel signed.
The Court reminds us, “As an occupying Power, Israel is obliged to ensure the basic needs of the local population, including the supplies essential for their survival. Obligations to this effect are set out in Articles 55 and 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” The obligation is also implied by the UN Charter, to which Israel is a signatory.
The Court adds, “Israel is not only required to perform the positive obligation to ensure essential supplies to the local population “to the fullest extent of the means available to it”, but it is also under a negative obligation not to impede the provision of these supplies or the performance of services related to public health.”
Instead of fulfilling these obligations, the Israeli government created a famine in Gaza by blocking the entry of UN food trucks: “According to the IPC, by 12 May 2025, half of the population of the Gaza Strip faced emergency levels of food insecurity . . . and nearly half a million people faced catastrophic levels of food insecurity.”
Or by check:
Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
(Remember, make the checks out to “Juan Cole” or they can’t be cashed)
Israel also has an obligation to avoid killing aid workers. Even where an aid worker might engage in resistance activities, Israel can only kill this person while they are actively engaged in warfare, not while they are in scrubs operating on a patient. The ICJ notes, “that, according to the United Nations, between 7 October 2023 and 20 August 2025, at least 531 humanitarian workers, including 366 United Nations personnel, were killed in the Gaza Strip . . .”
That is, Israeli has a positive obligation to ensure that the population it occupies is well-fed and gets health care. But it also has a negative obligation, where it fails in the positive one, to avoid interfering with the provision of such aid by the UN, UNRWA and other aid agencies, to ensure Palestinians are not malnourished or deprived of medical care.
The Court notes that the Geneva Convention prohibits the forcible expulsion of civilian populations from occupied territories, as does the UN Charter.
But, “According to some participants, including the United Nations, the Israeli military has issued numerous displacement orders, ‘forcing hundreds of thousands of people into overcrowded areas and restricting the United Nations’ ability to deliver urgently needed essential supplies.”
The Court upheld the UN-mandated role of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in providing aid to Palestinian refugees. It quotes a UN document that
- “under normal conditions” UNRWA operated almost 400 schools, over 65 primary health clinics and a hospital, and it had more than 17,000 personnel assigned to work in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. In the West Bank, it ran 96 schools and 43 health facilities. In the Gaza Strip, UNRWA was the primary provider of essential services, educating around 300,000 children in 288 schools and two training centres, delivering healthcare to some 900,000 patients and offering emergency assistance to around 1.1 million people. According to the United Nations, UNRWA was indispensable in delivering essential services to Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.
Israeli officials alleged that UNRWA was extensively penetrated by Hamas. The Court did not find these allegations credible, writing, “the Court finds that Israel has not substantiated its allegations that a significant part of UNRWA employees ‘are members of Hamas . . . or other terrorist factions.'” UNRWA had 17,000 employees in Gaza and the Court could not rule out that a handful were dirty, but it finds that the UN and UNRWA investigated all credible charges and that the organization’s neutrality is not in doubt.
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The Likud-led government of Israel throws the accusation of “terrorist” around without any evidence at all almost as indiscriminately as it does the accusation of “antisemitism.” In fact, virtually anyone who gets in the way of Likud schemes is smeared with both adjectives. The problem for this extremist Israeli propaganda is that it cannot stand up in the eyes of seasoned jurists, who make their judgments not out of fear or tribalism or emotion but out of a gimlet-eyed review of the evidence.
From my own point of view — the ICJ did not come out and say this, though it perhaps implies it — the Likud officials wanted to starve the Palestinians of Gaza. UNRWA got in the way of this genocidal project. They therefore slandered and banned UNRWA.
The Court pointed out that no other organization has UNRWA’s capacity to deliver aid to the Palestinians in Gaza. It admits that it would be permissible for Israel, as the occupying power, to ensure the health and well-being of the Palestinians it occupies using other organizations. The ICJ points out, however, that Israel has not in actuality provided any such mechanism, and that the now-disbanded “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation” was fairly useless and certainly did not replace UNRWA. The Israelis cared so little about actual food aid that this past summer the UN concluded that they had fostered a famine in Gaza.
In the end the Court concurred with UN Secretary-General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres that ” “there is currently no realistic alternative to UNRWA that could adequately provide the services and assistance required by Palestine refugees.”
“The Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, the seat of the International Court of Justice.” Public Domain. Via Wikimedia Commons.
Israel may also not keep out other aid organizations (as it has done): “Article 59 of the Fourth Geneva Convention refers to aid provided by ‘States or by impartial humanitarian organizations’. Thus, as long as the population remains inadequately supplied and Israel is not itself operating a system of humanitarian support that is in accordance with its obligations under international humanitarian law, Israel is obliged under Article 59 to agree to and facilitate relief schemes provided by third States or impartial humanitarian organizations such as the ICRC.”
In the end, the Court found that it has jurisdiction over Gaza; that it has the prerogative of issuing this advisory opinion; and that it is doing so.
It unanimously finds that Israel has the duty:
“to ensure that the population of the Occupied Palestinian Territory has the essential supplies of daily life, including food, water, clothing, bedding, shelter, fuel, medical supplies and services;”
It also finds that Israel has an obligation to let UNRWA do its job in Gaza.
Of 11 justices, only the Ugandan Christian Zionist Julia Sebutinde dissented on this one.
Also, Israel has to stop destroying hospitals and killing or abducting doctors (this one was also unanimous.)
The Israelis have to stop mass expulsions of Palestinians (unanimous);
Basically, the ICJ found that the entire conduct of the war on Gaza by Israel has been carried out in an illegal manner.
Shamefully, the US State Department under Marco Rubio denounced the ICJ advisory opinion. The US after WW II showed itself a leader in erecting the structure of International Humanitarian Law, in hopes of forestalling another global conflict. Some 64 million people were killed in WW II, almost the entire population of today’s UK or France. Now America is tearing down the edifice of law that it helped build. And that will come back to bite us on the posterior.
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