South Africa moved the International Court of Justice (ICJ), for an urgent order declaring that Israel was in breach of its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention.
The ICJ is a United Nations platform for resolving disputes between states.
The term ‘genocide’ has been defined using set criteria in the UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide-1948.
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
In 2019, the Gambia, on behalf of the OIC (Organisation of Islamic Cooperation), petitioned the court against Myanmar over its atrocities against the Rohingya people.