Category World News

As the Group of 20 leaders gather in Cape Town, clean air features on the agenda as a standalone priority for the first time in the forum’s history. The reality, however, is stark. Outdoor air pollution claims 5.7 million lives each year, and a report released last week highlights the lack of international development finance for clean air. Only $3.7bn was spent globally in 2023, representing barely 1 percent of aid, with only a fraction reaching Africa.

As the minister chairing the G20’s environment workstream this year, I am proud to have worked with member countries and international organisations to place air pollution firmly on the agenda. When Japan held the presidency in 2019, the focus was on marine plastics. Last year, under Brazil’s leadership, the G20 prioritised finance for forests. This year, we sought to treat the right to breathe clean air with the urgency it deserves.

In South Africa, our Constitution guarantees every person the right to an environment that is not harmful to their health or wellbeing. That principle guides our domestic policy and informs our leadership of the G20’s discussions.

This is the first G20 presidency on African soil, a fitting setting to confront this crisis. Africa is the fastest urbanising continent on Earth, and the choices we make today in how we power our homes, move our people, and build our cities will shape health, climate, and economic outcomes for decades to come. The burden of air pollution is already visible in hospital admissions, school absenteeism, and productivity losses across the continent. According to the World Bank, outdoor air pollution causes global economic losses equivalent to nearly 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) each year.

This reality is now reshaping the global debate. In May, governments adopted the world’s first global goal on air quality at the World Health Organization’s World Health Assembly, which aims to halve deaths caused by poor air by 2040. It was a landmark step, but without finance to match ambition, such commitments risk remaining words on paper.

Our G20 deliberations identified four barriers to cleaner air. The first is limited institutional capacity. The second is inadequate monitoring and data, leaving policymakers and citizens without reliable information. The third is weak cooperation across borders. The fourth is the shortage of finance relative to the scale of the problem.

The Clean Air Fund’s recent report makes this plain. In 2023, support for outdoor air quality in sub-Saharan Africa fell by 91 percent to only $11.8m. Globally, just 1 percent of aid was spent on clean air, and only 1 percent of that reached sub-Saharan Africa. In other words, less than one-10,000th (1/10,000) of global development funding supports clean-air efforts in one of the regions most in need.

That is not only inequitable; it is also economically short-sighted. Clean-air action reduces healthcare costs, boosts productivity, and supports the transition to more resilient economies.

South Africa’s own experience demonstrates what is possible. Through the National Air Quality Framework and the National Environmental Management Act, we have built a foundation for accountability and transparency in monitoring air quality. We have strengthened coordination between national and municipal governments, introduced targeted interventions in the Highveld and Vaal Triangle, and expanded our air-quality monitoring network so that communities can access real-time data. These measures are supported by our broader Just Energy Transition, which directs investment towards cleaner transport, renewable power, and improved waste management.

The lesson is that progress requires both political will and predictable finance. Domestic measures alone are not enough. International financial institutions and development banks must embed clean-air objectives within climate and development portfolios.

This year’s G20 discussions also underscored the importance of data. You cannot manage what you cannot measure. Expanding reliable air-quality monitoring networks in low-income countries is one of the smartest investments the international community can make. It empowers local decision-makers, supports innovation in clean technologies, and strengthens accountability.

The message from Cape Town is clear: clean air belongs at the top table. That recognition must now be matched by sustained progress to deliver measurable outcomes. In practice, this means embedding clean-air objectives at the heart of development finance and prioritising regions that have been left behind, especially across Africa, where pollution levels are high but funding remains negligible.

Clean air is not a peripheral issue; it is central to achieving climate goals, health targets, and sustainable growth. The science is clear: the same pollutants that harm human health also warm the planet. Tackling them together delivers faster and more cost-effective results.

We therefore call for a collective effort among governments, development partners, and the private sector to ensure that clean air becomes a central measure of success in the global transition. The right to breathe clean air is universal. Delivering it requires fairness, commitment, and finance that match ambition.

Three and a half years of war against Ukraine have weakened Russia’s cash reserves, indicators show, possibly signalling that its economic resilience is beginning to fray.

Russia experts have told Al Jazeera that the country of 143 million people is now almost wholly dependent on export revenue from oil and gas for its cashflow, and a major round of new sanctions could bring it to the negotiating table.

On October 14, United States President Donald Trump predicted that the Russian economy is “going to collapse”.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov responded the following day that the country’s financial system has a sufficient and considerable “margin of safety to allow the country’s leadership and all of us to implement the plans that we set for ourselves”.

But Peskov was perhaps too optimistic. Last month, the Russian Ministry of Finance said it had run a $51bn budget deficit in the first eight months of the year, surpassing a deficit provision of $47bn for the entire year.

Ministry documents seen by the Reuters news agency have suggested it was planning to cut its 2026 defence budget by $11bn to $154bn, a 7 percent drop.

Craig Kennedy, an expert on Russian energy and economics at Harvard University’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, told Al Jazeera the actual drop in defence spending will be closer to 15 percent relative to 2024, because bank lending to the defence industry has fallen by more than half this year.

“Funding for the war in 2025, including state-directed lending to arms manufacturers, is on track to contract by 15 percent this year,” he said.

Before the budget and lending cuts, Russian forces were advancing at a slow rate. Last year, they seized 0.69 percent of Ukraine, while suffering a large number of casualties. In the first eight months of this year, they have again seized less than 1 percent of Ukraine but again, tens of thousands have reportedly been killed in action.

The contracting economy and human attrition rates have led analysts to question the sustainability of the Russian operation.

‘The civilian real economy is flat to down’

Russia managed to run its war for three years without contracting its economy, raising taxes or running high deficits by tapping oil and gas export revenues and instructing banks to fund the defence industry directly, thus keeping that expenditure off the government balance sheet.

Its economy grew by more than 4 percent in 2023 and 2024 as the money flowed into the defence sector, taxes remained constant, and budget deficits came in below 2 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

But this has begun to change in the fourth year of the war, as short-term policies designed to maximise cashflow for the war begin to impact the real economy.

The government is planning to raise VAT, a consumer tax, from 20 to 22 percent and apply it to a broader range of companies, generating an extra $14.7bn next year.

The World Bank expects Russia’s economy to grow by 0.9 percent this year and remain stagnant for years.

“This year, the civilian real economy is flat to down. Many people say it’s in a recession, it’s only the defence sector which is still positive,” Kennedy said.

Russia’s Center for Macroeconomic Analysis, an independent think tank, agreed, saying all nondefence sectors of the economy had contracted by 5.4 percent so far this year.

The slowdown, said Kennedy, was largely due to the fact that the government has used bank credit and given it to the defence industry.

Russia’s central banker, Elvira Nabiullina, sounded the alarm in June at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum, saying, “We grew for two years at a fairly high rate because we used available reserves – labour force, production capacity, capital in the banking system, and funds from the National Welfare Fund, which the government used to patch budget holes and finance trillion-rouble mega-projects. Many of these resources are now truly depleted.”

Liquid assets in the National Welfare Fund have fallen by a third to $34bn, and $10bn of that has been set aside to shore up banks. Experts say this reserve could be fully depleted by 2026.

At the same time, Russia’s banks could now face a credit event, because Russia’s arms manufacturers might not be able to repay much of the $180bn in state-directed bank debt Kennedy estimates they have taken on.

“It’s all toxicity-prone, it’s dark money, nobody knows how much might go bad,” he said. “It’s 22.7 percent of the entire Russian corporate rouble loan book. That’s a big problem.”

Some of Russia’s biggest industrial companies are already showing signs of being in trouble: On October 9, Reuters reported that some of them had furloughed their workers to save on their wage bill.

‘Death by 1,000 cuts’

Meanwhile, sanctions are making Russia’s war efforts more expensive.

Olena Yurchenko, director for analytics, research, and investigations at the Economic Security Council of Ukraine (ESCU), a private think tank in Kyiv, estimates that Russia pays above market rates to import materials critical for its war machine, sanctioned in the West.

“You have to pay to intermediary companies and you have to wait longer,” she said. “Prices on average are higher by at least 30 to 50 percent. When it comes to products with clear military use, sometimes they have to pay more like 70 to 80 percent,” she told Al Jazeera.

These hurdles create an “unbridgeable gap in terms of technological advancement and capacity” of Russia’s defence industry, Yurchenko said.

That has immediate effects on the battlefield, she believes.

“If we could get less tempo, more delays, more failures of the machines in the battlefield, more problems with, let’s say, firing mechanisms, with missile navigation”, Russia’s fighting quality would be materially affected, compounding its economic woes.

“By a tactic of a thousand cuts, these effects start to build upon one another,” she said. “You could never predict the exact day where it snaps, but the conducive environment for it is definitely ramping up.”

‘Not at the point of collapse’

Sanctions on oil could have an immediate and decisive effect on Russia’s war economy, experts say.

Ukraine’s allies have banned Russian oil imports, depriving Russia of $82bn a year from the European Union alone. But Moscow has replaced some of that revenue by selling more oil to the vast markets of China and India.

“The Russian economy is not at the point of collapse despite the pressures that it faces because the Kremlin continues to get steady foreign income from oil, and it has actually had more success than challenges in developing long-term new business of late,” said Maximilian Hess, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a Philadelphia-based think tank.

Russia has sold a multiyear supply of oil to China at a steep discount in return for prepayment, which has put money in its coffers for now.

The EU, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada have responded by capping the price at which their tankers may sell Russian oil to third parties at $47.6 a barrel. But the US has not followed. Nor has it followed through on a threat to punish buyers of Russian oil with secondary sanctions.

Hess blamed “delays in bringing the US on board to a new lower oil price cap and the lack of moves by the US to continue to close loopholes in the sanctions regime” for Russia’s ongoing cashflow.

Anna Wieslander, director for Northern Europe at the Atlantic Council, a US think tank, said Washington’s strategy is “soft on Russia, and that’s how the Kremlin views it as well”.

“We can see that through the way Russia conducts its war in Ukraine, hitting civilians, infrastructure to a degree that it has not done before.”

Russia has launched record numbers of missiles and drones against Ukraine’s cities since Trump’s election to the White House last November, data collected by Ukraine’s air force show.

“The US leadership has changed … when it comes to addressing Russia as a threat to European security and the future of Ukraine,” Wieslander told Al Jazeera. “Europe will pay a very high price … for not being tougher now.”

The EU is now considering a 19th package of sanctions that would ban Russian refined petroleum products – a loophole through which Europe has continued some oil imports – and restrict the movement of Russia’s fleet of hundreds of tankers that are not subject to the price caps.

If designed effectively, it is believed, these measures could decisively strip the Kremlin of cash.

But the package’s most powerful political message, says Wieslander, is a proposal to use roughly half of almost $300bn in seized Russian central bank reserves held in European institutions to back massive loans for Ukraine’s defence and reconstruction.

Russia has called the notion “delusional” and has promised “countermeasures”, but EU members like Germany are shifting position to support the move.

“I think that realisation has kind of kicked in in a range of capitals that there needs to be a shift,” Wieslander said.

A Telegram chat between young members of the US Republican Party was found rife with racism, anti-Semitism, white supremacist symbols and violent language, Politico revealed on Tuesday.

The group chat, called “RESTOREYR WAR ROOM” – referring to an organisation called Restore YR, a young Republicans movement – included members of Young Republican organisations in different states, and related organisations.

Peter Giunta, who US media reported is aged 31 and is the former chair of the New York State Young Republicans (NYSR), said he created the group on Telegram to rally support for his campaign to become chair of the national Young Republicans organisation.

The messages, which were sent between early January and mid-August this year, have earned condemnation from both Republicans and Democrats, and participants in the Telegram group chat are now facing pressure to resign from positions within Republican organisations, while some have lost their jobs with elected officials.

What was in the messages?

Politico reported that the chat spanned 2,900 pages of messages. Themes of discussions included:

Nazi support and calls for violence

Giunta, the former chair of NYSR, a political organisation of young members of the Republican Party in New York, wrote “I love Hitler” in one of the messages.

Participants in the chat included Annie Kaykaty, a New York national committee member for the party, and Bobby Walker, who took over as the NYSR chair after Giunta resigned in late September amid allegations of financial mismanagement, including unpaid bills for club events and missing required financial disclosures, a Politico article published at the time revealed.

In another somewhat convoluted message, Giunta wrote: “Everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber. And everyone that endorsed but then votes for us is going to the gas chamber,” while discussing his campaign to become chair of the Young Republican National Federation, the official national organisation for young members of the Republican Party aged 18 to 40. While the actual ages of the chat-group members have been widely speculated about on social media platforms, Al Jazeera could not confirm these.

“I’m going to create some of the greatest physiological torture methods known to man,” Giunta continued in his message.

“Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic,” replied Joe Maligno, whose bio on X previously stated that he is the general counsel for the NYSR and the vice president for the Staten Island Young Republicans, according to a screenshot shared by Politico. Maligno has now removed both of these designations from his bio.

“I’m ready to watch people burn now,” Kaykaty wrote.

Racism and 251 slurs

Participants in the chats used racist, ableist and homophobic slurs 251 times in the chat obtained by Politico.

William Hendrix, the vice chair of the Kansas Young Republicans organisation, used a variation of the n-word more than a dozen times.

The members of the chat also referred to Black people as “monkeys” and “the watermelon people”, a racist stereotype taken from the history of African slaves growing watermelon to sell as a cash crop. Giunta and Hendrix both made references to “watermelon people” in separate messages.

When one member asked the group if they were watching a National Basketball Association (NBA) match, Giunta replied: “I’d go to the zoo if I wanted to watch monkeys play ball.”

In another message, Walker stated that a mutual friend had “dated this very obese Indian woman for a period of time”.

Giunta responded, saying the woman was not Indian.

Then, Samuel Douglass, a state senator from northern Vermont – who, according to his profile from the state’s legislature, plays the classical piano and violin, and keeps goats, chicken, ducks and bees on his family farm – interjected, writing: “She just didn’t bathe often.”

On another occasion, Douglass’ wife joined in the chat, making a racist, antisemitic reference to “expecting the Jew to be honest”.

In another message, Walker wrote: “My people built the train tracks with the Chinese”, referring to his Italian ancestry. In response, Maligno wrote: “Let his people go! Keep the ch–ks, though.”

Misogyny and rape jokes

On a separate occasion, Giunta wrote: “If your pilot is a she and she looks ten shades darker than someone from Sicily, just end it there. Scream the no no word.”

At another point, Luke Mosiman, the chair of Arizona Young Republicans, wrote: “The Spanish came to America and had sex with every single woman.”

“Sex is gay,” Dwyer replied. “Sex? It was rape,” Mosiman said.

Donald Trump

Politico also reported that the group chat members “spoke freely about the pressure to cow to Trump to avoid being called a RINO [Republican in name only]”. They also appeared to criticise the president for allegedly suppressing documents related to the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex crimes.

In one message, Dwyer wrote: “Trump’s too busy burning the Epstein files.”

How did the chat come to light?

It is unclear how Politico obtained the chat.

Its report revealed that at least one person in the Telegram was a Trump administration official – Michael Bartels. He is listed on his LinkedIn as a senior adviser in the office of general counsel within the US Small Business Administration.

While Bartels “did not write much” in the chat, according to Politico, he also did not object to any of the offensive messages that appeared there.

When the chat became public, Bartels denied being the person who had leaked it to Politico. A notarised affidavit he signed, which has been seen by Politico, also revealed that there was conflict between young Republicans in New York.

In his affidavit, Bartels said that Gavin Wax, 31, a staffer at the US State Department and the former president of the New York Young Republican Club – a separate organisation which is “in conflict” with NYSR, according to Politico – pressured him in a phone call to release the entire chat log.

“When I attempted to resist that demand, after providing some of the requested information, Wax threatened my professional standing, and raised the possibility of potential legal action related to an alleged breach of a non-disclosure agreement,” Bartels said in the affidavit. “My position within the New York Young Republican Club was directly threatened.” He did not give details about the alleged breach or expand on what information he had given.

Giunta then alleged that Wax was the person who leaked the chats to Politico.

What have members of the chat group said about the scandal?

Politico reported that Dwyer and Kaykaty declined to comment while Maligno and Hendrix did not respond at all.

Peter Giunta

According to Politico, Giunta claimed the leak was part of “a highly-coordinated year-long character assassination led by Gavin Wax and the New York City Young Republican Club”.

“These logs were sourced by way of extortion and provided to Politico by the very same people conspiring against me,” said Giunta.

“What’s most disheartening is that, despite my unwavering support of President Trump since 2016, rouge [sic] members of his administration – including Gavin Wax – have participated in this conspiracy to ruin me publicly simply because I challenged them privately.”

Giunta did apologise but also claimed the messages in the leak had been “doctored”.

“I am so sorry to those offended by the insensitive and inexcusable language found within the more than 28,000 messages of a private group chat that I created during my campaign to lead the Young Republicans,” he said. “While I take complete responsibility, I have had no way of verifying their accuracy and am deeply concerned that the message logs in question may have been deceptively doctored.”

Bobby Walker

Walker also claimed the messages had been altered, but also apologised.

“There is no excuse for the language and tone in messages attributed to me. The language is wrong and hurtful, and I sincerely apologise,” Walker said.

“This has been a painful lesson about judgement and trust, and I am committed to moving forward with greater care, respect and accountability in everything I say and do.”

However, he added that the messages “may have been altered, taken out of context, or otherwise manipulated”, adding that the “private exchanges were obtained and released in a way clearly intended to inflict harm”.

Samuel Douglass

On Wednesday, the Vermont state senator said he had not decided whether he should resign, as he has been pressed to do by Republican Governor Phil Scott and other GOP leaders in the Vermont House and Senate.

Douglass said in a written statement: “My role in the group chat in question was a procedural one about bylaws and floor strategy. There were often periods of multiple days when I didn’t check this group chat and I was unfortunately unaware of those comments. I should’ve been more vigilant, more careful, and less naive about who I associate with and my digital environments.”

He added that his message in the chat about a woman not bathing regularly “was not a generalisation and doesn’t represent my views or character”.

“I apologise so deeply to my constituents and colleagues that our county and state have been dragged into this,” Douglass said. “I am currently weighing all my options to ensure that the outcome of this is what’s best for the safety and wellbeing of my family and my constituency.”

How have others reacted?

Following a request for comment by Politico, a White House spokesperson said: “Only an activist, left-wing reporter would desperately try to tie President Trump into a story about a random group chat he has no affiliation with, while failing to mention the dangerous smears coming from Democrat politicians who have fantasised about murdering their opponent and called Republicans Nazis and Fascists.”

The spokesperson added that “no one has been subjected to more vicious rhetoric and violence than President Trump and his supporters”.

US Vice President JD Vance brushed off the message leak. Despite the members of the group chat being understood to be aged in their late 20s and early 30s, he said: “The reality is that kids do stupid things, especially young boys. They tell edgy, offensive jokes. Like, that’s what kids do”, during an appearance on The Charlie Kirk Show on Wednesday.

“And I really don’t want us to grow up in a country where a kid telling a stupid joke, telling a very offensive stupid joke, is cause to ruin their lives.”

New York governor, Democrat Kathy Hochul, expressed anger over the messages during a news conference on Tuesday. She said: “This is so vile it’s hard to find the words to put into context that these are people who are part of one of two major parties and they believe in gas chambers and rape and discrimination based on the colour of people’s skin.”

Republicans from New York also condemned the chat, including Rob Ortt, the Minority Leader in the state senate, and Representative Elise Stefanik of the US House of Representatives.

In a statement, Ortt called for the resignations of the group’s members from positions within the Republican Party, saying: “I was shocked and disgusted to learn about the racist, anti-Semitic, and misogynistic comments attributed to members of the New York State Young Republicans.”

Republican Congressman from New York, Michael Lawler, posted a statement on his X account on October 14, calling the messages “disgusting” and saying of the group members: “They should resign from any leadership position immediately and reflect on how far they have strayed from basic human respect and decency.”

The deeply offensive and hateful comments reportedly made in a private chat among members of the New York State Young Republicans are disgusting. They should resign from any leadership position immediately and reflect on how far they have strayed from basic human respect and… pic.twitter.com/gWuhczzolv

Which members of the chat group have lost their positions?

On October 14, the chairman of the Kansas Republican Party announced that the Politico article prompted Republican leaders to close down the Kansas Young Republican chapter, local media reported.

Additionally, Hendrix, the vice chair of the Kansas chapter, has lost his job as a staffer for Kansas Attorney General Republican Kris Kobach.

“The comments in the chat are inexcusable,” Kobach said in a statement. “As soon as the office learned of those messages, Will Hendrix’s employment was terminated.”

A week since the ceasefire in Gaza came into effect, tens of thousands of Palestinians are returning to the flattened rubble of the places they once called home. As they return, there is worry among prominent voices in South Africa – one of Palestine’s fiercest supporters – that the agreement may not lead to a meaningful and permanent peace.

It was just months into the war on Gaza in 2023, when South Africa made history by becoming the first country to take Israel to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on charges of genocide. That move reflected the hopes of thousands of Palestine supporters in South Africa and across the continent, as two million people suffered under bombardment in Gaza.

Last week, after more than two years of war, which killed at least 67,967 Palestinians, relief spread in Gaza and around the world as United States President Donald Trump’s peace plan was agreed to by Israel and Hamas. But in South Africa, the government and its supporters have promised to continue pressuring Israel for accountability over crimes inflicted on Palestinians.

There is a need to scrutinise the US’s peace plan, Naledi Pandor, South Africa’s former foreign minister under whom the ICJ case was filed in December 2023, told Al Jazeera, as it is important to make sure Israel answers in court for the Gaza war, and several other violations.

“The ceasefire is a welcome step because, of course, we want to end the killing,” Pandor said. “But I’m concerned because the struggle of the people of Palestine is about much more than the war that has been under way, [and] this genocide of the past [two years].”

Palestinians are “striving for self-determination, freedom, and justice”, she said, speaking in a personal capacity after retiring from government service last year. “I don’t think the ceasefire addresses the core issues relevant to the struggle of the Palestinian people,” she added.

“I believe the [ICJ] case must continue,” Pandor continued, highlighting the examples of past genocides. “We should, as we acted with Rwanda and Bosnia, ensure that perpetrators of war crimes are held to account. That is what we owe those who lost their lives in Gaza and other parts of Palestine.”

Pandor’s words echo the official South African stance. President Cyril Ramaphosa, speaking to politicians in Cape Town on Tuesday, stressed his government’s determination to bring the legal case to a proper close, one he said would bring “healing” for the Palestinians.

“The peace deal that has been struck, which we welcome, will have no bearing on the case that is before the International Court of Justice,” Ramaphosa said.

South Africa’s genocide case against Israel

When some of South Africa’s most renowned scholars arrived in The Hague to represent Palestine at the proceedings that began in January 2024, thousands of supporters stood outside the ICJ, holding up Palestinian flags. At the time, Western countries like the United Kingdom and France stood firmly by Israel, citing its right to defend itself. Both countries have since adjusted their stance by challenging Israel’s attacks on Gaza and even recognising the state of Palestine in September.

South Africa’s “dream team,” as the legal representatives at the ICJ were nicknamed by their supporters, included globally recognised law professor and apartheid critic John Dugard, senior counsel Max du Plessis, and barrister Adila Hassim, among others. In a lengthy presentation, they accused Israel of “genocidal acts” in violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention but also of a “75-year apartheid, a 56-year-occupation, and a 16-year blockade” of Palestinian territories.

Israel’s team, led by British lawyer and experienced international court expert Malcolm Shaw and Australian-Israeli lawyer Tal Becker, argued that Israel had a right to defend itself and that South Africa’s genocide claims could not be substantiated.

In its ruling in January 2024, the court found it “plausible” that Israel was violating the Genocide Convention, and ordered Israel to “take all measures to prevent” genocide. Later, in March 2024, following more prompting by South Africa, the ICJ ordered Israel to ensure that food entered Gaza in the face of famine. Finally, in May 2024, the court issued a third order requiring Israel to halt attacks on Rafah, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were sheltering at the time.

Israel did not comply with the rulings in all three instances, rights groups Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch found. Still, the case had some ramifications for Israel, with Belgium’s Wallonia regional government immediately suspending some weapon exports to the country, citing the court’s interim rulings and deteriorating conditions in Gaza. Japanese trading firm Itochu also cut ties with Elbit Systems, an Israeli defence contractor, following the court’s orders for Israel to halt the Rafah offensive.

Experts say the most challenging task for the South African team will be to prove that Israel intended to commit genocide in Gaza, a requirement that Pandor, who was also at The Hague last January, said the South African team has met. South Africa submitted a 500-page document detailing the evidence in October 2024. Israel’s counterarguments are due on January 12, 2026. Oral hearings will be held in 2027, and a final judgement could be pronounced by late 2027 or early 2028, analysts say.

Discussion of accountability absent

The International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) in August declared the Gaza war a genocide. It also noted that Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, which led to the death of about 1,100 people and the capture of about 200 others, constituted “international” crimes.

Melanie O’Brien, president of the IAGS, told Al Jazeera that South Africa had “accurately” represented the Gaza case to the court. Legal proceedings like the ICJ case and an ongoing case against Israeli leaders at the International Criminal Court (ICC) are particularly important now, in light of the peace deal, she said.

“Accountability is crucial, and the discussion of accountability is very noticeably wholly absent from the ceasefire and peace talks and plan, which is shocking,” O’Brien said.

“What is being presented is a situation where there will supposedly be a ceasefire, and perhaps peace, but there is not even discussion, let alone mechanisms presented, about holding perpetrators of horrific crimes accountable,” she added. “And we know very well from history that if there is no accountability, there will be no reconciliation, and the cycle of violence will simply continue.”

Meanwhile, the ceasefire itself, experts say, would have no impact on the ICJ’s schedule, but it could help Israel’s defence.

“It may have an impact on the substantive arguments in the sense that Israel can seek to use these developments as evidence that it has not been acting with genocide intent,” Mike Becker, a law professor at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, told Al Jazeera.

South Africa faces US backlash for ICJ case

This year, South Africa has been in the crosshairs of Israel’s biggest ally – the US – largely for its legal action against Israel.

Relations between Washington and Pretoria have deteriorated to the lowest point in decades, analysts say, because of the ICJ case against Israel, as well as South Africa’s close relationship with China and Russia – both US rivals – and false claims by President Trump that a “genocide” against white people is taking place in South Africa. Trump’s administration has offered asylum to dozens of white South Africans, a move analysts have called discriminatory as the US cracks down on other migrants.

Trump imposed steep 30 percent tariffs on South Africa from August, specifically citing the ICJ case against Israel as one reason. South African manufacturers used to enjoy tariff-free exports to US markets under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) framework, but are now in precarious positions, with some 30,000 jobs at risk, according to analysis from Liechtenstein-based Geopolitical Intelligence Services (GIS). Some 9 percent of South African exports, ranging from precious metals to vehicles to fruits, go to the US every year, the intelligence firm found.

Still, Pandor said South Africa’s own history of apartheid meant that it had the “moral obligation” to stand up for Palestinians in Gaza, despite the risk of upsetting others.

“In pursuing our own struggle against apartheid South Africa, we were assisted by many different nations as well as organisations in civil society, so we regard the bonds of international solidarity as extremely important and we take international law seriously,” Pandor said.

“We believed and continue to believe that great harm was under way, and that crimes against humanity and war crimes were being committed by the apartheid state of Israel. And that the people of Palestine and of Gaza at the time were in serious danger of elimination, and we felt that we could not be silent.”

Apartheid in South Africa began collapsing in 1990 when political prisoner Nelson Mandela was freed, and ended in 1994 when the Black majority was allowed to vote for the first time. The late Mandela and late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat were especially close, with Arafat welcoming the South African leader when he was freed from his 27-year imprisonment. In December 1997, while addressing foreign dignitaries in South Africa, Mandela declared the rallying cry that has since become a blueprint for the African National Congress-led government, saying: “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

Nearly two years after taking its first legal action against Israel, South Africa’s most pressing goal at the time – to urgently end the killings in Gaza – has been achieved, although it took “many months and many lives”, Pandor noted.

The task now, she said, is to deliver what she called the core demands of Palestinians: self-determination, sovereignty, and justice.