Comment by smoothjazz

You are allowed under international law to lead war with significant amounts of civilian casualties. The issue being judged is claims of Israel committing a genocide. This is just a preliminary order while the full case is considered, and it might be bad PR to disregard it, but nothing else will come of it.

When hearing 'genocide', most people immediately jump to the Holocaust, but the definition used by the ICC and IL in general is far more permissible:

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:

(a) Killing members of the group;

(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

A to E are horrible acts by themselves, but what makes a genocide is intent, and intent is very hard to prove. Personally, I think SA brought a very strong case forward, the genocidal tendencies of key Israeli decision makers and exeters are well published. In the US and Europe, the political class and general public just ignore the evidence currently, and a ruling of the ICC might help people 'wake up', but not much tangible consequences will result from it otherwise.

The measures ordered by the UN court are in references to Article II of the Genocide Convention [0], which limits the scope to “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, where the court identifies the group as “Palestinians in Gaza”. So it’s the intent of genocide towards that group which is the deciding factor. As long as the actions do not carry that intent (and are plausible as such), they are not prohibited.

My reading is that the court is basically saying “You are presently running the risk of committing genocide, please take all measures in your power to prevent that.”

[0] https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-...

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