Israel-Gaza: What did the ICJ ruling really say?

That triggered a counter-letter from UK Lawyers For Israel (UKLFI). The 1,300-strong group said the ICJ had only ruled that Gaza Palestinians had a plausible right to be protected from genocide – in other words, that it had been dealing with a complex and somewhat abstract legal argument.

The dispute continued in more letters and interpretations.

Many in the first group described UKLFI’s interpretation as “empty wordplay”. The court, they argued, cannot have been solely concerned with an academic question – because the stakes were far higher than that.

And, of all places, the debate crystallised in legal sparring before a UK parliamentary committee, debating the question of arms exports to Israel.

Lord Sumption, a former UK Supreme Court justice, told the committee: “I think it is being suggested [in the UKLFI letter] that all that the ICJ was doing was accepting, as a matter of abstract law, that the inhabitants of Gaza had a right not to be subjected to genocide. I have to say that I regard that proposition as barely arguable.”

Not so, responded Natasha Hausdorff of UK Lawyers for Israel.

“I respectfully insist that reading a finding of plausible risk that Israel is committing genocide disregards the Court’s unambiguous statements,” she replied.

A day later, Joan Donoghue – now retired from the ICJ – appeared on the BBC’s HARDtalk programme and explicitly tried to end the debate by setting out what the court had done.

“It did not decide – and this is something where I’m correcting what’s often said in the media… that the claim of genocide was plausible,” said the judge.

“It did emphasise in the order that there was a risk of irreparable harm to the Palestinian right to be protected from genocide. But the shorthand that often appears, which is that there’s a plausible case of genocide, isn’t what the court decided.”

Whether there is any evidence of such terrible harm is a question the court is far from deciding.